My Time At Portia

2023-12-31
I was really looking forward to dipping into this game. A 3D Harvest Moon with some basic RPG elements? Count me in. But sadly I bounced off because of the insistence on grinding and glacial pace.

Booting it up the first time I was struck by how cursed the character creator was. All of the face choices for a male character looked off. I mean, I was able to create Coach Steve from Big Mouth very easily with the limited set of preset options. Cursed. Next you get to choose the voice for your character and those ranged from immediately off-putting to just not very good. I ended up choosing the option that leaves your character silent. A wise decision. These were the first indicators that there is a fair amount about this game that reflects its origins from a smaller team.

But after embarking into the world I was pleasantly happy to see the visual splendor of it all. It's a vibrant world with a pastiche of the pastoral and the post apocalyptic. These hints of exploring ruins and discovering the past hooked me along with the sprinkling of experience and progress bars for everything you do. Chopping trees, mining rocks, picking things off the ground and talking to people all moved little meters up. Either enabling my character to grow in their skill tree or progress in relationships with characters. Sadly this feature of meters moving up ends up being the downfall of the game.

You spend your time, as with most of these Harvest Moon-alikes, by gathering materials, crafting things, and fulfilling quests by turning items in. The problem is in My Time At Portia most of the crafting involves waiting for a station to finish automatically crafting an item. This goes for prerequisite materials as well. That means I have to wait for my copper to turn into copper bars and then those copper bars to turn into copper plates and so on. I played for 4.5 hours and in that time I only finished one main quest. And that took me probably 2 of the hours just to craft a bridge with simple components. That's insane.

The top negative review on Steam mentions that the game can be fixed by playing with mods. That's a pretty damning indictment. And honestly even with mods what's on display here is just a worse Stardew Valley. Between the clunky, barebones mechanics that feel like Recettear but bigger (and by proxy, emptier) and the rough voice acting (the big bear guy literally sounds like his VO was recorded in Ventrilo replete with redlining audio) I just don't think this game, charming as it is, is worth anyone's time unless they are really into these farming sims.