My Time at Evershine is a new era for Pathea’s cozy life sim series

Pathea, the developer behind My Time at Portia and My Time at Sandrock, has announced a third game in its cozy life sim series. My time at Evershine pushes the franchise into a new age with a story-driven campaign, brand-new art direction, and a wild frontier to tame.

My Time at Evershine promises to redefine the life simulation genre. As you can see in the trailer below, it boasts a bold new art direction, but the changes go much deeper. In addition to the cozy life sim elements fans know and love from the series, there’s a deep RPG system with quests and a major storyline in place. Pathea aims to broaden the game’s appeal with these new elements, offering much more variety and multiple paths for players to pick when it comes to progression or an endgame.

Your time to shine

As with previous entries, Pathea will be launching a Kickstarter campaign for My Time at Evershine on September 24, 2024. You can sign up to be notified when it goes live and keep track of every milestone it hits. If you’re a fan of the franchise, it’s also worth joining the official Discord server so you can chat with the developer and learn even more about this title.

In addition to revamped mechanics and the renewed vision for combining story with the cozy life sim elements fans know, My Time at Evershine is set to have a 40+ hour narrative. As you play, you’ll explore a vast and engrossing world, get stuck into the town management side of things, and, of course, pursue a meaningful relationship with one of the many romanceable characters.

The two most striking changes in this latest installment are the larger story elements and the focus on exploration. The story has a more defined antagonist, and it sounds as if it’ll give you more of a reason to play the game each day rather than just waiting for your potatoes to grow.

You’ll be building a new settlement on the edges of the Free Cities. This requires you to recruit settlers and slowly build up an infrastructure that can sustain itself and thrive before the story is over. The influence of the Duvos Empire is a monolithic opposing force, but instead of fighting it with firepower and rebellion, it sounds very much like you’ll be pulling together a band of people and magical creatures who simply want to exist outside of the regime.

This sounds a lot like Fallout 4‘s settlement system to me. But what I want to see from it is more characters with deep backstories just living a simple life in a small settlement, putting their knowledge or craft to use in a kind, mellow way as opposed to what they’ve done in the past. I definitely don’t want to be constantly told about other settlements I must go out and save, but it may come with the RPG territory.

You can play solo or in multiplayer with friends, but you’ll also recruit up to three NPCs to help you out during the day. Each one has its own needs you’ll have to take into account while playing, and Pathea has outlined that it’s aiming for 8-10 romanceable characters. Given the new art direction, I can see a lot of fans getting hot under the collar for My Time at Evershine‘s cast very quickly.

Evershine is a new location you’ll explore in the series’ overarching story. It’s nestled between the Duvos Empire and the Alliance of Free Cities. Both powers are moving to secure as much land as possible after the Duvos Empire decided to lay claim to the Orzu Ruins, which is where you come in. You’ve got to make Evershine a defensible position just in case things go south, and ensure it’s set up to last for decades as the Alliance of Free Cities expands.