SunnySide

As a texture pop-in enthusiast, this game scratched that itch like none other before.

This game is far from being perfect, but honestly? I love it. Pros -This game is genuinely fun. While most of the activities you can do in SunnySide will be familiar to people who like to play farming games--certainly farming, ranching (caring for livestock), fishing, cooking, and mining/combat are nothing new--some of the systems used in these activities are done differently. No longer are you using a watering can--now you have a hose (thank god), and once you unlock further skills, you can set up an automatic irrigation system to water your crops. Cooking is more complex than just having the items in your inventory, as you need to consult the cookbook app on your phone to figure out what tools and appliances you need to cook the recipe, and as you unlock more complex recipes, there are multiple different components to the recipe you need to cook before you can put everything together. The food crafting system allows you to make various tea leaves and seeds, fermented products (wine, etc.), cheeses, roasted nuts, oils, and can and package foods. For combat, you buy different ofuda at the shrine, which are consumable "cards" that will have some sort of attack or effect on the enemies. Your combat buddy similarly has different chips that have different attacks. You also have a "wildlife" skill, for which you earn experience by fishing, taking care of your bee hives, and photographing birds and bugs. -There are TON of recipes for cooking and food crafting. -You can unlock multiple vehicles to get around town. They're super fun to drive as well. -There is a skill tree that requires donations of certain items to the shrine, much like how the museum system works in numerous cozy/faming games. -A game that isn't pixel art! As much as I love the likes of Stardew Valley, Fields of Mistria, etc., and enjoy their art, it's nice to have other options. SunnySide can look a little janky at times, but it's still cute (and the jank can be pretty funny sometimes). Cons -There are bugs in the game, and not just the ones you photograph. I've had my character get stuck before (for which there is a "return to last sleeping spot" option), and I've also had rain not trigger my plants being watered. The game can also lag or stutter. I STRONGLY recommend that you only play the game if you have a PC that exceeds the minimum specs, as it's clearly not well optimized. I've also found that playing only ~3 days at a time before closing the game and reopening it seems to help keep the bugs and lagging/crashing to a minimum. I've only had one crash in the game, which was possibly due to just running the game for too long. -The bugs you need to photograph can be pretty hard to see. You can unlock skills at the shrine to make it so that you can get closer to them before they fly away, they visit your farm more frequently, etc., but it would be nice if in future updates they made photographing birds and bugs a little easier. -It's hard to earn enough experience points to level up in certain skills. Some skills like farming, ranching, etc., are pretty easy, but I've needed to cheat cooking because the experience points you get from making recipes is just too low. It's also very hard to get experience points for the wildlife skill tree. Again, for future updates/SunnySide 2.0, it would be nice if the experience points were rebalanced. -This seems to be pretty well known about this game, but I do need to reiterate it because it is a major bummer: the romanceable characters in the game have romance preferences based on gender expression, and if your gender expression does not fall within their romance preferences, you cannot date them. So you end up being locked out of romantic relationships with a majority of the romanceable characters. This really sucks if there's a character you particularly like but cannot date (looking at you, Allen). It's an interesting idea, but ultimately this is a cozy/relaxing/escape game, and it feels a little too realistic to have a video game be like "um, you're not my type." Brutal. -There need to be more interesting cooking recipes available at low levels! It sucks to only be able to cut bread, cheese, and brew tea until you level up. I can't wait to see what the devs do with SunnySide 2.0. I think they have a phenomenal base to work off of, but even when they make something better, I'm sure I'll still be visiting SunnySide 1.0 from time to time.