Sunshine Farm

I really wanted to be able to recommend this game but after around 6 hours (my playtime shows a little extra from being in the main menu while taking breaks and writing this review), I just can’t in good faith, especially considering that it’s full release and not early access. The only good thing I have to say is that I appreciated how it tried to do something different (finding new hunting areas took a bit of exploration) and I can see how even that would be a turnoff for some people. But all of my following issues were just in my first 6 hours with the few machines I’ve gotten (not including all of the more nit-picky lack of QOL stuff, the minimal, confusing “story”, and whatever might go wrong going forward). I’ll play it a little more if only to make the most out of the $5 or $6 I spent on it on sale since I’ve played too long to get a refund (but if I could, I would). I’m the kind of player that loves finding all the nooks and crannies of places but the explorative feel this game tries to go for can be frustrating. I’ve spent hundreds of hours in similar games and at times, I really struggled with navigating this one because it doesn’t even try to teach you how to play, establish a flow of doing things besides upgrading the festival booths, or set up any way to give you information besides trial and error. The biggest issue is with how clunky this game can be in some ways, it can be hard to differentiate between a bug and between something that’s trying to do something new so it’s hard to navigate in general. I’ve had a lot of little weird things happen in my time so far. My game glitched 3 times in the first two hours but time kept going and the auto save kept me from losing much progress so I wasn’t too bothered by that. Some things that are labeled as flowers wouldn’t go into the flower display. Dialogue can be really clunky because it repeatedly processes like “[Player] Don’t forget” instead of “[Player], don’t forget”, and some of the punctuation that does exist shows up as a ? box. I know I’m not the only one that struggled at first with just figuring out how to get machines to process. On top of that, the machines don’t always stop their animations when the processing is done and there’s really no indication for whether there are available products to pick up unless you go up to them. Even what little information you are given can be blatantly wrong. Spring says it has no adverse or favorable effects on the calendar and then I was hit with a week of rain that gave me less customers and could damage my crops when I already had little resources. The smoker gives cooked meats, not smoked meats. There’s a “smoked cooked meat” recipe but it requires an already smoked meat (which, again, does not appear to be an option) rather than an already cooked one. Soap molds says it uses natural ingredients to make soap so I thought I could use the different wildflowers I’d been finding that wouldn’t go into the flower display at my shop. It was frustrating to spend so much money only to see I needed another machine to make essences for it. This could’ve been prevented if the description just said it uses floral essences instead of natural ingredients since the press does bother to let you know that it makes essences in the description. Even then only some flowers can be made into essences while others are oils with only one being both but it’s unnecessarily arbitrary and restrictive.