So... Sunnyside is finally out after years of waiting. This game made buzz amongst the content creators back then by having the classic farm sim formula modernized. However, the hype died down fairly quick after several delays occurred. I personally lost the enthusiasm myself.
Now it has been more than 3 years since the Kickstarter campaign, and the game finally released despite all the setbacks. I had to try the game myself and see if it really lived up to its initial hype. I've played the game for only about 8 hours now, and my short answer to that question will be somewhat no. I guess I just had really high expectations. The game sure has some really interesting and unique mechanisms and content, but I just dislike the way everything plays out. The game design feels very... amateur. Without spoilers, I can only say the pacing is a mess. It's trying to emulate the very famous open world formula by having several story quests play out at the same time, which is cool but really overwhelming to have it from the very start especially when each part of the quest feels very conflicting theme wise. My biggest issue is how I have to spend days trying to figure out where I need to find a person/specific item because the game simply won't give me any pointers. In general, I almost feel the same way I did with My Time at Portia (which I dropped very quickly). The game has the right ideas and mechanisms, but the execution is clunky.
My first impressions:
I'll get out my biggest complaint first: the game isn't release-ready at all performance-wise. I know it's harder to optimize the games for the PC since everyone has varied specs, but « Harvest Goddess », the optimization stinks. I'm playing on the lowest settings, and the game still lags. A lot, and I'm not even exaggerating. The game runs fine until you actually enter several interiors. From what it seems, the main issue is that the interiors stay loaded, causing huge memory leaks. The developers promised to fix this up as soon as possible and find a new way to load in the interiors, but for a game, they just delayed one last time to make sure they patched up all the bugs. It's definitely not a good look. You can't even pet or pick up the extremely cute baby chickens because of some bug, such a cruel way to play with our feelings!
The mechanisms are cool, though. The game sells its uniqueness through character dialogues, which I find really cheesy, but I guess it's a nice way to inform players what this game does differently from your average farm sim. The whole watering gig is nice. You get a hose and use it to water all your crops until you run out of water. The entire farming process is more realistic with bees pollinating, you ordering seed packets, fertilizers needed only for the growth and so on but it never gets complex to annoy you or consume your time which is really nice. The whole process isn't that different but it's still a much welcomed change. You also have a huge, realistically sized town, but since you can travel using the vehicles quite early on, the exploration aspect isn't daunting at all. Well, other than the fact it takes 2s to get on and off your ride. The town feels stranded fitting for the plot as compared to the city, which you can visit and hang out at. That's about what comes to my mind for now.
And then we have the romance. It's really easy to romance someone. You just ask to hang out at places, choose an activity to do (a small cutscene) and then an event will trigger with them talking to you about what's going on in their life. It's pretty repetitive but I would say the dialogues are quite fleshed out for each of the characters.
My complaint with the romance aspect would be the options being limited to a specific gender choice. You can pretty much figure out if a person is into your gender choice or not by seeing which characters have their confess option pop out the earliest. I went to identify as a squarely masculine guy, and this one guy only took three dates to get confessed to. So far, so good until I realize only one out of my seven choices was actually into me. From what it seems like, your pool is much bigger if you love characters that are the opposite « Chicken Hugging » to you. So if you're looking for candidates with same-« Chicken Hugging » romance, your pool is heavily reduced from 12 to just 5 or 6 candidates depending on your gender choice. All that builds up just for them to say you're not their type and would like to just stay as friends. I get that it's meant to be realistic, but I hate being limited to options that I don't find attractive.
Last but not least, I hate the lack of cohesiveness in the game's entire theme. The juxtaposition between the main story and the game is weird. The game itself feels very grounded and realistic until you open up the main story and see how heavy it goes on fantasy and RPG elements. I would very much prefer to focus on bringing the town alive by simply helping out at the farm rather than the whole "save the town from an impeding calamity" thing they have going on. This aspect is what made me feel this game was definitely a passion project from a small dev team. Not a bad thing that they were doing what they love to see in video games but it's definitely a random artistic choice for this game atleast.
Overall, the game is enjoyable, just clunky in many areas. I would rate it 7/10 personally as of now. It's such a shame since it had a lot of potential. I wish the developers had done a better job at guiding us, at least initially. I know it's too late to change the game design, so I'm just going to hope this game sells well enough for them to try making a sequel for this game that will execute their ideas right again (very unlikely given the mixed reviews and how the devs already seem very burnt out). Pathea Games pretty much did that with My Time at Sandrock fixing My Time At Portia and MtAS became one of my favorite games ever in this genre. I hope this game has a great future ahead but for now, let me clock in some more hours and enjoy this game to the fullest!
Oops my bad lol. Thanks for pointing it out. Guess my Sandrock craze isn’t still over despite all these new releases. 
