At the moment Steam is having a mass demo extravaganza for a hundred-odd upcoming games.

I don't normally care about demos, or betas, or even early access, but when the developers of My Time at Portia put up an announcement saying that their sequel's demo was up for download... I might have been a little bit interested.

My Time at Portia, once I discovered it, ended up being one of my favourite go-to games for a while back there. I'm a sucker for open world, exploration, crafting, sandboxxy games with a life-sim component, and the game ticked everything I liked. I never did finish it though... that might have to be rectified in upcoming days. 😁

New playthrough!? New playthrough! Will I finish this gigantic, time-intensive game this time!? Probably not!

But anyway, even though I never finished the story, and might've only reached maybe the halfway mark of the game, the moment the developers mentioned they were making a sequel, I wishlisted it, and I was eager to have a look at this demo.

The demo of My Time at Sandrock is only a small fragment of their alpha and is not indicative of the final state of the game, but so far I'd say that they've managed to stay true to the feel of their world and lore, and it feels just like the previous game.

However... I don't feel the same awe I felt when I first opened Portia. Well, I'm not sure "awe" is the correct word. Sense of beauty. And that could just simply be because Portia is located in a beautiful, lush environment whereas Sandrock is in the desert and I'm very much more of a grass-and-trees type of person. Or it could be because the graphics aren't refined just yet and even with everything maxxed things look a bit... sketchy.

And I was annoyed to discover that they haven't change the water in the game. In the first game, you step into the water and the game blacks out and you reappear on the bank. That was understandable. It was swimming-depth and obviously your character doesn't know how to swim.

In this though... the water isn't swimming-depth, and I can't just walk across it. And I have to wait for a 5 second black screen to go away before I can continue on. Ugh.

Improvements though! The first improvement I discovered was in the character creator.

It's no secret that I love a good character creator. I can spend an hour or two creating the perfect character in a game. Even the most simplistic creators have me spending far too much time in them. And a lot of the time I will refuse to play a critically acclaimed game (Witcher, Horizon Zero Dawn) just because I can't make my own character.

Sandrock's character creator clearly isn't finished yet, but what is there is great.

AND! No longer does the player character have ugly red-rimmed eyes and red eyelashes!

Which reminds me. If I doooo decide to do another playthrough of Portia, need to grab that mod that fixes the ugly-arse eyes.

More importantly... the character customisation is great, but the second vast improvement I noticed is fantastic. And it's a gameplay one, not a visual one.

Building! In the first game you needed to have all the items required for a build in your clickable inventory and had to select each of the many items and pop them in manually.

I mean, that sounds immersive, but when you build soooo many things, this new method is such an improvement.

No longer do you have to select each thing individually, find the tiny selected spot where it fits in, and manually place it. Nope! Now you just need the items in your inventory and the building apparatus knows that you have it and puts it where it belongs! Hooray!

Another annoyance. Now equipped clothes count as inventory space. Precious inventory space. 🙄

I am really hoping that is an oversight that's in this alpha and not intended for the actual released game. I'm wearing clothes, not carrying the damned things.

Beginning-story-wise, your character doesn't seem to have an antagonist to play against this time; instead, you have an instant friend who's super pumped to be working alongside you in this new city.

Unless she turns into a proper competitor later on, there doesn't seem to be an antagonist in the game just yet.

And then there's this guy... who literally seems to be a walking, talking glitch.

His name is Fang and he looks like a guy from Final Fantasy. Yet when talking to him, his name is X and his portrait is a bird, and he's squawking like a pirate parrot.

I really don't think that guy's meant to be like that. 😅

All in all, despite a couple of little things, I'm confident that Sandrock will be a great sequel to Portia once it's actually ready for release.

I don't often get hyped/excited for upcoming games these days, I seem to have calmed down a bit in my increasing age, but I am looking forward to this and the demo has cemented that. 🙂

If there's one thing this demo did achieve though, it's the sudden urge to play the first game again and actually finish it this time!

😁😁😁

 

Until next time,

Thanks for stopping by!

 

---

 

_{All screenshots in this post are courtesy of me, @kaelci and are from the gameplay demo of My Time at Sandrock.}