My Time at ... series - It'll be three games soon. That's a series, right?

[Irrational Exuberance]

I tried SandRock for a week and for whatever reason it's not grabbing me. I see and feel the QoL updates, the graphics are a nice few steps up from before, and the pacing, while a touch slower, is as tightly designed as ever. It's overall an objective improvement yet I can barely put in a few hours at a time. I fuggin beat Portia within a week yet I'm haven't even finished a full in-game month yet in SandRock. I'm not usually the type to get burnt out on a game so It's really bugging me, man.

Am I missing something? Should I be playing a little different from Portia? Please help me out here because this game should be clicking for me but it just isn't.

Weirdly, I had the opposite issue where I couldn't get into Portia; the overworld around the Workshop seemed to stretch on and on with nothing of real interest, the characters just weren't clicking for me due to some awkward translation choices (and after hearing the voice for the male MC I switched it right off), and the initial Ruins basically being nothing but a large room full of dirt that had to be slowly dug out made the whole thing not very much fun for me. Meanwhile, the developers really hit it out of the park with making the Sandrock area smaller yet denser, the characters were all charming and well-written, and the different ruins actually had more character and a better signposting of where to go to continue on to the next floor.

I won't say Evershine's a Day 1 purchase due to the series' track record of needing balancing patches and adding material, but it seems like the developers have a good grasp on story and gameplay by this point.

(Oh, and I used mods to increase maximum stack size, force the refiner to always give higher stats per upgrade. and change how tasks were displayed, all of which improved the game for me (and maybe you as well, who can say?).