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estiroseI have the Skies of Azoria DLC, but I'm in the middle of part 2 right now so I can't really give it a review other than "kinda fun, definitely different".
Non-spoilery:
Cute, but maybe not worth full price. Good if you like farm cozies with a lot of crafting. Dungeons okay but there are certain things that make later dungeons very annoying. Fast travel setup is interesting and extends to said dungeons in a way that other Stardew-esque games I've played haven't done. You do get wings but don't expect to fly. Plot is eh. Character customization is fun and fairly inclusive; I spotted a hijab and you can choose your pronouns. This is practically built for co-op but can be played solo. (I played completely solo.)
I'm going to try to organize these into something coherent:
1. Character customization: Four body types, good skin color/eye/hair color; good variety of hairstyles, including a turban and a hijab (with or without hair showing). You can choose your gender, but it picks up your username (at least on Steam) and I couldn't figure out how to change that. You start with a default outfit and you can buy/earn/make others to a very limited extent. (This includes your wings once you acquire them.)
2. Your farm: You start with a small farm, and of course you won't be able to clear it completely at first as you'll need to upgrade your equipment. Over time, you'll gain extra farms/homes/space. All farms include a well, a house, and a shed. Three of them include some sort of animal housing. The shed is bottomless and all sheds are linked (so if you dump your logs into one shed, you can retrieve it at another shed as well as the original one).
3. Farming: You have to build garden beds. You'll start with a basic garden bed (that you'll craft) for vegetables/vegetable-type plants, and early on, you can also build flower beds. Most vegetables have to be replanted when they're grown, flowers don't. There are limited seed types for both - for the foods you're expected to use a special fertilizer to get other crops, while you have to breed flowers for certain crafting recipes (not required for the main game, but a fair amount of aesthetic crafting requires you figure flower breeding out). You'll later get special other garden beds.
4. Animals: Also do not die if you neglect them, but they don't produce if they don't get food. Your first animal enclosure brings you what are essentially cotton-producing rabbits and egg-producing chickens. You're required to buy a chicken for a quest but are not required to keep them for the rest of the game, and the rabbit is mostly for crafting recipes that require cotton. A 2nd animal enclosure gives you a cow-equivalent and a sheep-equivalent - same as the coop animals, you're required to get a cow for one main mission but you can sell it, and the sheep wool is good for other crafting recipes. The third gets you some magical creatures - one that produces leaves used in various recipes and the 2nd that produces silk (neither of these is required for completion).
5. Crafting: Apart from some festival offerings, basic seeds, and a small amount of drinks/food/potions, almost everything has to be crafted (including decorative items/outfits where you had to have the ingredients on hand before you could buy the item from the merchant). I swear I built more crafting stations for the main game than I built for My Time at Sandrock!
6. Dungeons/combat: Interesting mechanics in this one. The enemies are called 'jumbles' and they are objects affected by the wild magic that have been tossed into the local cave and forgotten. Each dungeon has 25 levels, where 24 are regular levels and the 25th has the local sprite hanging out. The dungeons also contain the ore you'll need to upgrade your tools, and you'll want to put some of that to one side to make 'seals' (some of the seals also require gems; it's a bit complicated). The 2nd and 3rd dungeons also require you to keep a stock of specialized potions on hand to safely go in them, and these do not last forever. The different dungeons - if you don't have a seal - require you to perform certain actions to open the next door (the first dungeon requires just finding a hidden switch, while the 2nd dungeon requires finding 2 orbs and putting them on the statues next to the exit, and the third one has you transport a flame to a shrine but said light has a countdown and goes out, requiring you to grab it and try to rush to the shrine).
7. Tool upgrades: 5 of the items (axe, pickaxe, scythe, watering can, shovel) require you to bring ingots and money to the local blacksmith (Cinder, who I was pleasantly surprised to find was female). Each upgrade requires ore that requires going down various mines to get, of course, and each upgrade (except the last, gold) requires 1 more ingot than the last upgrade (so 1 copper, but 2 iron, 3 feyrite, 4 silver, 5 orichalcum, 5 gold). You'll need to get at least the scythe and pickaxe to orichalcum to finish the game. The other two, the catching net and fishing pole, just require you to upgrade your net/pole to the 2nd level, which just require a skill level of 5 each.
8. Collecting with a net: You'll be required to do some creature catching for mostly potion ingredients to advance the plot, but you won't be required to catch them all for it. I find the catching mechanic not too terrible, and actually kind of fun.
9. Fishing: I think this is the first cozy I've played with fishing where it just feels like a chore. Fortunately, apart from one quest that requires you to get 3 of a specific fish, you're free to fish up whatever you want. I find the game to be somewhat buggy when it comes to wiggling the line - sometimes when I cast close it still allows me 3-4 tugs before my line completely retracts and sometimes even casting far I can't wiggle the line without retracting instantly. What also doesn't help is that this game's fishing takes more than a bit of getting used to as you have to observe the fish pattern, throw your line to somewhere ahead of where the fish is/will be, do 2-3 tugs to get it to bite, and then you can play the little minigame of not letting the line snap.
10. Weather: You have to brew or buy drinks for cold/hot weather or you'll lose energy. While this is realistic, I really didn't enjoy having to run around looking for tea leaves (which only regenerate every few days) or similar to make iced/hot tea. Or running down to the inn to buy tea when I just don't have time to hunt tea leaves.
11. Fast Travel: The same mechanism to keep the doors open/provide fast travel between dungeon levels is used to enable fast travel points between locations via what are called wayshrines. There are 9 locations that you can travel to, though to be honest, I haven't enabled over half of them yet. For example, I haven't activated the Spooky Woods wayshrine because it's fairly close to your 2nd farm area (which is close to your 1st farm area) and you still have to go halfway across the Spooky Woods area to get to the resources. The others are oddly located as well for me - I have the wayshrines closest to my farm areas and the dungeons unlocked, and that's about it.
12. Damage and death: I really appreciate the no falling damage for most places (if you fall off one of the areas in the 2nd and 3rd dungeons you lose half your HP, but that's it). If you run out of HP in the dungeon, you get ejected instead of ending up at the healer's. (Which is good, because Vera is annoying.)
13. General plot shenanigans: Parts of the plot felt very similar to others: there is something going on, descend this dungeon to find out why x is happening. Find sprite. Fulfill sprite's food needs. Sprite gives you a new spell and a more powerful staff (your weapon). There is one sprite that doesn't require you descend a dungeon but you did have to make a potion so you don't freeze getting there. I felt sometimes like I was spending half my time finding/making ingredients/brewing potions to further the plot rather than to have fun.
14. Random stuff: I enjoyed the animations in general - your farmer grimaces when they break rocks that require more than one hit, for example, and the out of water animation is hilarious.
Non-spoilery:
Cute, but maybe not worth full price. Good if you like farm cozies with a lot of crafting. Dungeons okay but there are certain things that make later dungeons very annoying. Fast travel setup is interesting and extends to said dungeons in a way that other Stardew-esque games I've played haven't done. You do get wings but don't expect to fly. Plot is eh. Character customization is fun and fairly inclusive; I spotted a hijab and you can choose your pronouns. This is practically built for co-op but can be played solo. (I played completely solo.)
I'm going to try to organize these into something coherent:
1. Character customization: Four body types, good skin color/eye/hair color; good variety of hairstyles, including a turban and a hijab (with or without hair showing). You can choose your gender, but it picks up your username (at least on Steam) and I couldn't figure out how to change that. You start with a default outfit and you can buy/earn/make others to a very limited extent. (This includes your wings once you acquire them.)
2. Your farm: You start with a small farm, and of course you won't be able to clear it completely at first as you'll need to upgrade your equipment. Over time, you'll gain extra farms/homes/space. All farms include a well, a house, and a shed. Three of them include some sort of animal housing. The shed is bottomless and all sheds are linked (so if you dump your logs into one shed, you can retrieve it at another shed as well as the original one).
3. Farming: You have to build garden beds. You'll start with a basic garden bed (that you'll craft) for vegetables/vegetable-type plants, and early on, you can also build flower beds. Most vegetables have to be replanted when they're grown, flowers don't. There are limited seed types for both - for the foods you're expected to use a special fertilizer to get other crops, while you have to breed flowers for certain crafting recipes (not required for the main game, but a fair amount of aesthetic crafting requires you figure flower breeding out). You'll later get special other garden beds.
4. Animals: Also do not die if you neglect them, but they don't produce if they don't get food. Your first animal enclosure brings you what are essentially cotton-producing rabbits and egg-producing chickens. You're required to buy a chicken for a quest but are not required to keep them for the rest of the game, and the rabbit is mostly for crafting recipes that require cotton. A 2nd animal enclosure gives you a cow-equivalent and a sheep-equivalent - same as the coop animals, you're required to get a cow for one main mission but you can sell it, and the sheep wool is good for other crafting recipes. The third gets you some magical creatures - one that produces leaves used in various recipes and the 2nd that produces silk (neither of these is required for completion).
5. Crafting: Apart from some festival offerings, basic seeds, and a small amount of drinks/food/potions, almost everything has to be crafted (including decorative items/outfits where you had to have the ingredients on hand before you could buy the item from the merchant). I swear I built more crafting stations for the main game than I built for My Time at Sandrock!
6. Dungeons/combat: Interesting mechanics in this one. The enemies are called 'jumbles' and they are objects affected by the wild magic that have been tossed into the local cave and forgotten. Each dungeon has 25 levels, where 24 are regular levels and the 25th has the local sprite hanging out. The dungeons also contain the ore you'll need to upgrade your tools, and you'll want to put some of that to one side to make 'seals' (some of the seals also require gems; it's a bit complicated). The 2nd and 3rd dungeons also require you to keep a stock of specialized potions on hand to safely go in them, and these do not last forever. The different dungeons - if you don't have a seal - require you to perform certain actions to open the next door (the first dungeon requires just finding a hidden switch, while the 2nd dungeon requires finding 2 orbs and putting them on the statues next to the exit, and the third one has you transport a flame to a shrine but said light has a countdown and goes out, requiring you to grab it and try to rush to the shrine).
7. Tool upgrades: 5 of the items (axe, pickaxe, scythe, watering can, shovel) require you to bring ingots and money to the local blacksmith (Cinder, who I was pleasantly surprised to find was female). Each upgrade requires ore that requires going down various mines to get, of course, and each upgrade (except the last, gold) requires 1 more ingot than the last upgrade (so 1 copper, but 2 iron, 3 feyrite, 4 silver, 5 orichalcum, 5 gold). You'll need to get at least the scythe and pickaxe to orichalcum to finish the game. The other two, the catching net and fishing pole, just require you to upgrade your net/pole to the 2nd level, which just require a skill level of 5 each.
8. Collecting with a net: You'll be required to do some creature catching for mostly potion ingredients to advance the plot, but you won't be required to catch them all for it. I find the catching mechanic not too terrible, and actually kind of fun.
9. Fishing: I think this is the first cozy I've played with fishing where it just feels like a chore. Fortunately, apart from one quest that requires you to get 3 of a specific fish, you're free to fish up whatever you want. I find the game to be somewhat buggy when it comes to wiggling the line - sometimes when I cast close it still allows me 3-4 tugs before my line completely retracts and sometimes even casting far I can't wiggle the line without retracting instantly. What also doesn't help is that this game's fishing takes more than a bit of getting used to as you have to observe the fish pattern, throw your line to somewhere ahead of where the fish is/will be, do 2-3 tugs to get it to bite, and then you can play the little minigame of not letting the line snap.
10. Weather: You have to brew or buy drinks for cold/hot weather or you'll lose energy. While this is realistic, I really didn't enjoy having to run around looking for tea leaves (which only regenerate every few days) or similar to make iced/hot tea. Or running down to the inn to buy tea when I just don't have time to hunt tea leaves.
11. Fast Travel: The same mechanism to keep the doors open/provide fast travel between dungeon levels is used to enable fast travel points between locations via what are called wayshrines. There are 9 locations that you can travel to, though to be honest, I haven't enabled over half of them yet. For example, I haven't activated the Spooky Woods wayshrine because it's fairly close to your 2nd farm area (which is close to your 1st farm area) and you still have to go halfway across the Spooky Woods area to get to the resources. The others are oddly located as well for me - I have the wayshrines closest to my farm areas and the dungeons unlocked, and that's about it.
12. Damage and death: I really appreciate the no falling damage for most places (if you fall off one of the areas in the 2nd and 3rd dungeons you lose half your HP, but that's it). If you run out of HP in the dungeon, you get ejected instead of ending up at the healer's. (Which is good, because Vera is annoying.)
13. General plot shenanigans: Parts of the plot felt very similar to others: there is something going on, descend this dungeon to find out why x is happening. Find sprite. Fulfill sprite's food needs. Sprite gives you a new spell and a more powerful staff (your weapon). There is one sprite that doesn't require you descend a dungeon but you did have to make a potion so you don't freeze getting there. I felt sometimes like I was spending half my time finding/making ingredients/brewing potions to further the plot rather than to have fun.
14. Random stuff: I enjoyed the animations in general - your farmer grimaces when they break rocks that require more than one hit, for example, and the out of water animation is hilarious.
