As in Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon, in My Time at Portia you arrive fresh-faced in a new town, set to take over the dilapidated business a relative has left to you. In this alternate life you’re a workshop owner, crafting items for the locals, taking on building projects for the town, gathering materials, dating the local population and, yes, engaging in some light farming – because it just wouldn’t be a bucolic fantasy without some crops and cutesy cows.
Portia is a beautiful world of exquisite colours and bold brush strokes. Your workshop sits in front of meadows filled with frolicking multicoloured llamas, as wheat sways in fields and the locals wander the gorgeously designed streets of the town. But Portia’s sweet idyll is tempered by the realisation that it’s actually postapocalyptic: towering above are the decaying metal ruins of high-rise buildings. Exploring ruins of the old world uncovers relics and data disks that can either be given to the Church of Light, which believes that anything from the old world should be destroyed, or the Research Centre, which uses them to come up with new blueprints for you to build. This schism in the town is interesting, but after 20 hours of play, not much has been done with it; while the art is brimming with character, the writing doesn’t quite match up.
My Time at Portia pushes many of the features found in other life simulation games a little further. You can decorate your house not just for aesthetic pleasure, but for useful boosts to your character’s abilities. Crafting is streamlined and enjoyable – its “sort all” button should be implemented in every crafting game. As you become friendly with one person in town, their friendship network also starts to warm up to you, and being friends with someone leads to perks such as discounts and help with your chores. I found myself googling regularly to figure a lot of this out; My Time at Portia doesn’t force you through tedious tutorials, but it also doesn’t explain much.
The biggest issue is pacing. It takes time for your machines to smelt ore, weave cloth and shape wood, and these wait-times can be pretty significant. Some days I felt as if I had far too much to do, and other days I was standing around, not sure how to occupy myself. It can be annoying have to wait two days just to do the first of about 20 steps for a big story mission.
I found Portia’s daily routine comforting: wake up, tend to the crops and chickens, gather any materials that had finished processing, build what could be built on a project, find the doctor and give him his daily herbs in an effort to romance him … it’s almost meditative in its repetition. Very occasionally, I’d be diverted by an urgent plot point involving battling rat bandits in a cave, or chasing a flying machine that drops presents. But comfort would increasingly slip into boredom as I watched the timers on my machines creep down. More than once I left my PC to make a cup of tea, letting the game run and the timers tick by themselves. I could feel the game’s pacing jarring with my own tempo of play, but, despite that, I’m constantly drawn back to Portia. This kind of relaxing escapism is exactly what’s needed when the real world feels like such an endless mess.
My Time at Portia is out now on PC (later this year on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch); £24.99
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