The Persona 4: Dancing All Night of Stardew Valleys
Little Rocket Lab takes one cozy life sim and two automation games to craft what could arguably be one of the best games of the year. Following the story of a young girl who has returned to her Aunt’s land to finish building the rocket ship her mother and aunt had started working on years ago. Little Rocket Lab asks players to not only finish what the family started, but help to restore the surrounding local resources and ports to the flourishing places they once were.
To build, one must craft by setting up automation line to mine resources, refine them, and them produced them into different objects which can then be combined together to produce an even greater number of objects. Setting up these production lines can be daunting at first, but after setting up a few and unlocking some different ways to move produced items around it becomes easier to envision how getting an object from one place to another goes.
Players can bond with the locals through completing tasks from them and having conversations or sharing a gift. The locals in turn will sometimes give their own gifts or other things that might be advantages to your manufacturing.
A day night cycle does occasionally interpret the fun, as it forces players to go to sleep at a certain time in the night. This can throw a wrench into your plans as it might interrupt you right as you are trying to figure out how to most efficiently setup a new production line. There are also season changes in the game, but they appear to be linked to task compilations and not in game days.
Little Rocket Lab is able to take the cozyness of a lifesim, somehow add in the brutalist nature of production automation, maybe a dash or two of the players own self imposed efficiency, and come out the other side with a fuzzy blanket I’ve already spent over 30 hours in. I mean you can play fetch with your dog! I’m in for at least another 20 hours.
This Review is based on a PlayStation 5 code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. Images and video courtesy publisher and SideQuesting. This video first appeared on The SideQuest Live for October 07, 2025
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