My Time at Portia

If you enjoy these types of games (farming/life sims, open world, cute RPG, etc.), I can't imagine you wouldn't love My Time at Portia. I love Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, etc., and this game might be the best one I've found in the genre. It's so robust. The graphics are incredible, the world is so large, there are a large variety of things to do and how to do them, and it all keeps you wanting to go back for me.

I highly recommend this game. I can't wait to play the next two in the series!

This game is more of a concept than anything, really. The game's main mechanic of finding the vast amounts of your copper/tin/etc. ore are located in "Abandoned Ruins." Which are gated behind a "Weekly Maintenance Fee." If you don't want to end up like me when you first start, don't buy anything with your currency, Gols, and only put your measely 100 to your first week of using the town's Abandoned Ruins. Get an Axe and Pickaxe, go to the ruins and get a ton of Copper Ore by digging around. Once you get enough for a fishing rod, immediately get it as soon as possible. You can get cocoons by kicking the large trees by going up to them and using the prompt to kick them.

Once you have your fishing rod, it's time to print endless money. You can buy caterpillars from Sophie's Farm Shop inside her farm building. Get a ton of them, and fish near where the bridge mission is to get a lot of fish to sell at the bakery and cafe shop. This will let you be self-sufficient as you will always make way more than the cost of bait. Sometimes bait will also be found in bush type trees. Also make sure to fix all of the gaps in your house so you get full stamina after sleeping. Or else you'll always start with half stamina.

I would highly recommend My Time at Sandrock over this one however, as Portia is a little rough around the edges still:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1084600/My_Time_at_Sandrock/

Some useful tips that will help you out along the way if you really plan to play My Time at Portia:

• Storage Chests will allow you to use materials for crafting stations without needing them in your inventory. The only exception is the assembly crafting, which requires you to have the material/item on your quick bar/hotbar. Fuel can also be recharged through items in storage chests.
  
• You DO NOT have to win the "Spar" matches against the Civil Corps to open up the door that's unlocked in the Hazardous Ruins Mission. Just run around for a whole minute. I ended up completing the mission "The Bassanio Lift," before completing the Hazardous Ruins mission because I didn't know this; which makes the Hazardous Ruins mission completely moot and worthless, as the Lift gives you access to the same areas.
  

[*]During the "Key" Ruins, the theme that plays while exploring the ruin should take priority over the battle/combat theme. EG: Don't play the battle/combat theme while in these dungeons. It would make for a far better experience.

Could not click with this game at all.

The game felt both too handholding and too aimless.
It just seemed tedious to play. Didn't feel like I really wanted to do anything.
None of the characters were likeable to me either, which certainly did not help.
The graphic style is definitely not for me either.

Beautiful and fun for what it is. Nothing too in depth. Oaks is my main squeeze and I luv papa bear. Want to play sandrock but it was expensive so went with this one first. I am not experienced in star dew like games, this broke my cherry and I like it. 3.7/5

Without mods, the game is a tedious but charming Casual Life Game. It puts more emphasis on crafting as you are a builder foremost, than farming. A large cast of quirky characters with about 80% voiced lines. Several romanceable characters and a sprawling open world map that expands as you help the town.
With mods however, the tedium can be reduce to suit your needs.

Recommended Mods:
- Your Game Your Settings (to adjust tedium of crafting times and run speed as well as speed up any other aspect, such as relations, reputation, and experience gain.)
- Longer Days (set to 2x)
- Instant Loot (this allows INSTANT pickup of items, rather than waiting a few seconds for items to fly to you from the ground. Can also be used to pickup relics instantly should you choose to do so.)
-Always Open (allows access to places outside their hours including the research center, musuem, A&G and the commission board.)
- More Displayed Missions (The game limits this to 3, this allows you to raise that to whatever you like, though if they are very long they will cut off of the screen)
- More Commerce Orders (Hard limit in game is 1 a day. This lets you not only increase that, but increase the maximum amount of orders that appear on the board)
- Infinite Levels (for those who want to max out the skill tree and continue to become stronger)

I wanted to love this game. I do like it. BUT i struggle to recommend it.

Pros:
-The characters are fun
- They really nailed the romance in some scenes
- there is a real benefit to having a horse

Cons:
- there isn't enough proper cut scenes, you dont get many traditional friendship cutscenes. I do like the fact you get special quests, but it feels like it shouldn't replace friendship events
- so much of this game is WAITING. Waiting for the crafting machines to finish.
-the animations are SO SLOW it takes like, a full minute realtime anytime you want to interact with an animal. Half a minute to pick things up.
-the items dont all work how youd expect, e.g. a fence for creating gardens doesn't create a garden
-upgrading a crafting machine doesnt use the old one
-the character is too slow (especially for the animation!)


SUPER CONS, Finally, the biggest issues and the reason i cant recommend:
It runs. Like shit. It is so bad. I've got the settings on simple with all effects and percipitation off on a legion go. Everything is just off. Which is hard because the animations run slow already. The biggest problem is the game doesnt save unless you sleep. Fine, but the days are SO LONG when you end up doing a main quest dungeon. No spots to save, so sometimes you'll be forced to either quit and lose your whole days progress or play for an hour or two longer than you intended. I like to play a day before bed so i sometimes have to quit out of the game and lose progress if i get too tired and im halfway through a dungeon. The save thing would be passible if the game didn't CONSTANTLY crash. Every day has a 1/8 chance of crashing. This combined with the saving and the fact that days can be so long makes the game unbearable frustrating at times. I once played the same day 7 times.

The saving combined with the crashing makes me unable to recommend this game. I haven't played sandrock yet, I'm hoping the devs applied any lessons they learnt on portia and better optimised the game

Fun and relaxing, the controls are a bit clunky but it's a lovely world to lose yourself in.

Honestly a great cozy game!
easy inventory management (all chests are connected)
you can slow down the time progression (don't have to hurry to get everything done)
not heavy on the farming sim (you're a builder, not a farmer)
fun style, absolutely recommend!

Good game. I have been eyeing it for years so when it went on such a huge sale I finally jumped at it.
Fun characters, very pretty graphics. I am only a little into the actual game but so far the small stories are fun.
It really needs an in game guide to what is found where, yes I know I can look it up online. But I'd rather stay in game and read a manual where I can look up "what drops item X" Or what level do I need to improve a station too so I can craft a certain item.

I am currently dumping my time into this game, and will continue to dump my time into this game, for the same reasons that I dumped hours of my life into Minecraft, with some very notable exceptions.

It's like Minecraft, except you aren't alone in an uncaring world, which will do wonders for your mental health.
It's like Minecraft, except everything that isn't useful to you is at least sellable so you don't have crates upon crates of garbage.
It's like Minecraft, except the game doesn't punish you for mining down.
It's like Minecraft, except you actually have a purpose.
It's like Minecraft, if that game had fleshed out characters and an in-game economy.

And most importantly, it's like Minecraft, except you can FUCK.

Or at least, it's implied. Unless all the kissing causes pregnancy...

Oh, and the soundtrack is nice too!

I like it so far but I wish I knew what I was doing,,,

It's a fun game. Not as good as Sandrock but it has its charms. It's a little more grindy but that also adds a challenge.

Coming back to this game has really brought me back to reality. I play a lot of violent and intense First Person Shooter games and when I launched the game back in what felt like forever, I felt unable to concentrate on its beautiful and magic scenery, or the exceptional story line. So to anyone looking to pick this game up, don't make the same mistake I did, but take your time progressing through the plot and the glorious landscapes.

Though the art style is a bit cartoonish and there are a few bugs that were never mended before the developers moved on to their next game, I would still highly recommended MTAP. It quickly became one of my favorite games, and the My Time series is one of my favorites in general now. For those just getting into the series, it's definitely best to start from the beginning so you can appreciate future character cameos and references more.

If you like simulating simple engineering projects while conducting agriculture with light combat- this is your game.

A TIER

Great game. The art and style are charming, IMHO, although I can see why some others aren't keen. My biggest complaint about the art style is that everyone has the same body type, tbh. Can I help it if I want a man with SHOULDERS? But that's not a huge deal. There are some QoL issues that are irksome, especially in early game, but it's not a deal-breaker to me and it is something that gets better as you progress. The Suprise Fun element is taking photos and displaying them on the walls of my house! The colors and backgrounds with all the different weather and times of day are breathtaking, and there are some very interesting and artistic poses. This is actually the only thing that I HIGHLY PREFER over the sequel, MTAS, which is better in every way but this one. The Devs missed the boat with the photo tool (particularly poses) on Sandrock.

If your favorite thing about New World was mining and logging - you might be a cozy gamer.

Avoid if you don't enjoy a nauseous amount of fetch quests.

Meh. It's fine... A bit too much like an MMO with repetitive fetch quests to be any more than 5/10

I wanted to try and play it before getting Sandrock since I've apparently had Portia in my library for a while and I don't remember getting it before and my friends tried to warn me about how it wouldn't be worth it and I thought they were just exaggerating. They were not.

For a game that came out in 2019 the game's surprisingly hideous to look at artistically and as someone who usually doesn't notice stuff like that in games for me to notice it is something. You get hit by a rather ugly character creator when making a new game where none of the options make you feel like you're even making a human and hitting random on the creator (I thought it was random for a name so I hit it on accident initally) smacks you with awful randomized assets for the character. The first time I've seen a character creator where none of the randomized options were decent and each one seemed to get worse than the last. I eventually settled on a character with a beard to hide a majority of my face.

Unluckily for me upon getting to Portia the weather for both my in-game days was cloudy and overcast which didn't help make anything about the game look nice. The few NPCs I met besides maybe Arlo and the two animal NPCs were also not appealing to look at either and had a mixed bag of voice work.

Doing the first few quests was a chore as I at first couldn't find rocks to mine since they blended into the ground with the overcast weather. When I got to the quest to build a structure it was annoying to build something when I had to have the item physically in my hand to place in it and couldn't just do it when the item was in my inventory (something that did get fixed in Sandrock thankfully according to my friends). After becoming a builder from finishing these two quests, my friend gifted me Sandrock so I'll just play the superior version with QoL changes.

What an amazing game! It's my first one in the series and I can't wait to play Sandrock. Definitely recommend playing if you like Life sim and want to relax from heavy fighting games sometimes.

Personally, I'm not too into combat. However I loved exploring the world, collecting, mining, and crafting. The characters are great too.

Initial interest

In-game activities

The features that caught my attention the most

What do I think about the action in the game's plot?

My Time at Portia is a fantastic cozy and chill game.
To me it's got some Stardew Valley vibes, but instead of being focused on farming (which is possible in Portia as well), it's more focused on completing commissions and quests, by creating or building items.

It's also one of those games with a nice detailed Wiki which is a great help. Besides the things I mentioned, you can also raise animals, increase relationships with the NPCs, participate in (holiday) events and decorate your house/garden.

The combat is simple, and pauses when you open your inventory so you can heal in peace. Also if you die during a boss fight, in most cases you just respawn at the boss while you have full health & the boss health didn't change.

A full price of €30 you will definitely get your money's worth if you're going by the €1 for 1 hour rule, though the game regularly goes on sale. As I write this, it's 80% off, so you can pick it up for €6 which is very much worth it if you like cozy and relaxing games.
I've enjoyed my time here and I'm looking forward to trying out their follow-up game My Time at Sandrock & eventually My Time at Evershine which is currently in development as well!

Portia only has singleplayer mode, but Sandrock & Evershine both (will) have online co-op.

Achievements
Going for 100% completion is a grind and there are some missable achievements, so it's worth to check out a guide beforehand if you don't want to start over multiple characters.

The game automatically backs up the last 10 days you've played which is very helpful, and you can also create your own backups in the "Load" list in the main menu too. This is great for some achievements like the marriage ones so you can go back to a previous save instead of having to divorce and lose friendship points for example.

I can say I really enjoyed my time with this game. Even with the frustration I was feeling with the final mission(You need to grow crystal trees well before it comes around, just no avoiding it), it totally vanished when I found out it was the last, I couldn't help but want more. It is a very sudden ending honestly but it fit well. The combat started to get a bit dull but that wasn't too problematic. Story had some nice depth to it, The world, even with some flaws that came about about halfway through the second year, felt very much alive. I do wish the AI had more plot, they seemed to get glossed over honestly. There was still so much I had to do so maybe I will come back to do all that later.

The game keeps crashing on me at random! It wouldn't be so bad if I could save the game WITHOUT sleeping. Totally undoing any progress!

I love this game so much! It's beautiful and addicting, and its relaxing with just enough of a grind element so that you can play it both ways (slow and relaxing or fast) :)

I Did A Review For My Time At SandRock Which Is really The Game That Came After My Time
at Portia Alright So Like I said in The SandRock Review This Game Portia Is Cute , Great Graphics
Probably Run On Lower End Machines I Noticed Some People Saying It was Laggy Etc
It Ran Fine For Me HOWEVER Like SandRock The Crafting And Building Were The Same
Just Awful In Fact Worse , I kept These Games Hoping I Could Get My Head Around Them
But Am getting Old And Due to Illness My Concentration Is not The Same So Sadly
Like SandRock A Big Thumbs Down On This Game As Well For Me A Waste Of Money
So Devs I Hope Your Taking Note Here On People With Problems

Honestly I didn't think this would hold up. I played and nearly 100% completed My Time at Sandrock first so I thought this would be a huge downgrade. I was wrong. It is a solid game in its own right and the minor QoL stuff missing actually kind of adds to it's charm. Full throated endorsement.

After playing My Time at Sandrock, I wanted to go back and play the OG. Definitely didn't disappoint. If you like one, you'll like them both. The character art is a bit iffy with some characters imo, but it's such a fun game that it's easy to get passed this.

This is my second platform playing this game on. It's highly addicting LOL I love the My Time series so far. I can't wait for evershine to come out 🥰😍

This game is fun, but it takes a long time to complete all the achievements. Anyway, I bought both Portia and Sandrock.

It's far from Stardew Valley if you're looking for a similiar game. It's more towards crafting and building, and you do have a lot of grinding for materials to do at the beginning of the game. The characters are a bit more childlike with their demeanor, design are a bit lackluster too. The midgame towards end is so much more rewarding and fun though, but you do get bored of it after a while, i ended up downloading some mods to get through the more grinding missions easier by reducing the action time for certain digging / cutting.

Do get it if it's on a discount, otherwise i think it's alright to miss.

great life sim the crafting aspect is alot of fun, the voice acting leaves a little to be desired.

I've owned this for a number of years. I enjoyed it then and recently started another play through. The game is enjoyable, relaxing. However, one change I noticed from prior experiences, when loading a game it takes a long time and sometime seems buggy.

One of the first game that I "double dip" both on my smartphone and now Steam. I bought this bundled with My Time at Sandrock back in 2022. Honestly, I didn't finish this game all the way to the end until I started playing Sandrock when it's out from early access phase. So I will compared both of them directly.

Pros :

• It's Cozy/farming sims game like Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, you named it. And, in this game you play in 3rd person view, with some some kind of base building mode for your farm/workshop and there's "automation" mode, something that you could find on Factorio or Satisfactory kind of games I assume.
  
• On top of all gameplay features that you could find on any other Cozy/Farming Sims game, This one has some unique feature called Jealousy. As the name suggests, you could get in a relationship with several bachelor/bachelorette at once and if you get caught by another npc that you have relationship with, just like in real life if you get caught cheating, you'll paid the price. Add some more spiciness and uniqueness into this game
  

Cons :

• (This one is fixed in My Time at Sandrock) You can only pick 1 commission per day and you can't improve it further whatsoever (your biggest source of income early on in the game).
  
• (This one is fixed in My Time at Sandrock) In some instances, you need to equip the resources or material in your one of your quick bar slot that only have 9 slot to finish some task. Like early game Assembly Station (to build something) , Cooking Pot (for cooking), and some missions that requires you to place the one you've already build at designated location.Basically you need to open your inventory and shuffle things up back and forth every single time.
  
• (This one is fixed in My Time at Sandrock) Your backpack inventory, your storage box and your factory storage box are not interconnected. And again you'll need to transfer them manually back and forth
  
[*]This game has more than hundreds if not thousand different items. Sorting them in different storage boxes and sifting through them all when you need it is nice and all, but I wish this game has search function to search an item(s) in your inventory and storage boxes.

Amazing. The team has really another game in the series My Time at Sandrock and another one (My Time At Evershine) is getting realised early next year which I am very excited about. It is really immersive and calm game for anyone who just wants to relax.

i like this game even more than stardew valley, and i really like stardew valley.
the graphics are fun and the flow of the game keeps it interesting. there is enough information given to be able to figure out basic game play, and the game speed control allows you to make the best use of your day according to your play style.
i look forward to spending many more hours exploring the rest of this world

One of my favorite entires in the wider "Farming Sim" genre, even though it's not really a farming sim. So cozy, so cute, and the gameplay is so fun! I really hope they start a separate kickstarter for a remake, since we didn't hit that goal in the Evershine kickstarter!

Honestly, the game is a little buggy but other than that it has a cute story line, action based stories and missions, and a fun building experience where you will waste hours waiting for your carbon steele bars to smelt. All in all, it's cute and a little different from stardew valley which was the main selling point for me to get the game. I do recommend the game if you are very patient and just want something cute to play that isn't stressful.

Is very fun. Endgame can be a major slog especially if your trying to %100. Either good luck or mod it.

I made the mistake to play My time at Sandrock first, and got over 180 hours in it, while still doing playthroughs just for the fun of it. Had to try this game too and as the older game you can see where some QoL stuff is still missing. This one feels a lot more tedious/grindy.
However, it is a really charming and fun game and im enjoying my time here. I like the progression through the main story and enjoy interacting with the NPC's.

I also have played this game on my PS5 and it is huge in a certain way, is everything you could ask for a farm and cozy game. It has many story, many things to do. I have replayed this on PC years later and of course I have seen more flaws than the first time but it doesn't stop it from being such a good game.

I think the main downside of the game is the art work. The design of the characters. Some are very good, and others not so good, I think the main flaw is this but it's understandable since it's the first game in the series, it really wanted to make me play Sandrock and I cannot wait for Evershine, nor the remake of Portia.

There not enough words, if you are interested in these type of games, give it a try, it is a long one, mostly 100 hours on your first run and many more if you want to do mostly everything the game has to offer. In this second run, while I knew most of the things, I have reached almost 80 hours by beating the main story and getting almost all the collectables except for fishing. No time for social interaction, but also beaten all the floors of the last dungeon.

I enjoyed my time at Portia!! :]

It was a very charming experience but it's pretty rough around the edges, quite janky. I'd definitely recommend it on sale if it looks like your kinda genre! Makes me very excited to see how this team has improved on the formula for both Sandrock and Evershine though!

After 100+ hrs and nearly half the achievements gained, even if I haven't finished the game quite yet, I'm ready to give the game a conditional recommendation. There's plenty of fun characters and uniquely crafted scenarios to interact with that keep My Time At Portia from feeling like a generic retread of other contemporary games...

But there's some very rough edges in the production. Such as dialogue text not remotely matching what characters are verbally saying at times, leaving you to wonder which version was the more recently decided upon interaction that was meant for the final cut and which was the obsolete one that wasn't properly edited.

The ranged combat is terrible, especially trying to aim weapons. You can angle yourself in the enemy's direction and shoot at them, but your character might turn in a 90 degree angle and shoot off into the distance at nothing, for no discernible reason as to why the game decided to try locking on in that direction. Even when an enemy is at point blank range and you're facing them, and there's no sudden turns in a random direction, you might not hit them with a ranged attack. If you're wanting reliable attacks, melee is the only option. And like most cozy sim games, the melee is standard wacking away to get drops you need.

Some main quests having insanely obvious stalling barriers to drag out completing them. Such as the most recent case I ran into where I, the builder lady with advanced experience in several dozen machine designs and all the necessary schematics who has single-handedly rebuilt half the town and a new town at this point, cannot build a wind turbine without first asking Petra how to do so to make her feel relevant and once against allowing her to extort me for an arbitrary number of random data disks that are statistically improbable for actually holding the information she'd need for this specific diagram. And it turns out, Petra can not provide me with the design. She tells me to talk to the nurse lady, of all people, because her family might be in the power business and some specialized knowledge in engineering must have passed on to her through osmosis I guess? And then you track the nurse down, who tells you the obvious thing that she does not in fact have that knowledge, so go talk to this other random lady with a similar background of family connections. this lady, once run down for a chat, had gained that knowledge by proxy, and after wrestling with her moral beliefs for five seconds, decides to pass the info on... To Petra... Not you. So you'll have to wait again for Petra to send you the info you could've gotten right there and then. And that diagram has no new special building aspects to it, despite all the chat about needing something new to achieve the necessary power being generated- it's just a handful of very basic components you likely have a stockpile of already being tossed together in a way that's similar to other designs you've made. There's no reason you couldn't have done that on your own, except to drag out the task a few extra days via waiting on Petra's letters.

As fun as the game is, those sorts of scenarios can make the game feel like a frustrating grind sometimes. But given how much I enjoy other aspects of the game- especially the broad storytelling and world building that sometimes tackles far more serious content (such as war veteran ptsd, as one example) than the cutesy art design would lead one to believe, and variety of quests beyond the generic fetch quests many games in this genre rely on- I am willing to overlook the rough edges. I will be giving the Sandrock sequel a try with the hope it provides a more polished experience that isn't quite so grindy.

Absolutely love this game! I've beaten it twice and keep coming back! It does glitch sometimes, but is bearable. I love the story line and never get bored.

This game is so much fun and I love it! I plan on doing Sandrock next and then the 3rd one when it comes out. Love the quests, the flexibility of game play, the amount of things that you can do, the romance, the building of the land, fishing, everything! Great game!

This game crashes over and over. Seems like it would be a good game but the crashing did me in, deleting.

Fantastic game. Have bought the entire series across multiple platforms. Can be used as a grind game or as a relaxing game. It has a bit of everything

A farming sim substantially more solid than the others. However, it is grindy in some ways, and the adventuring part seems a little half-baked. IIRC, there are no difficulty options either. And events + hook-ups that happen at the same time appear to be buggy/very bad-design. 8+/10.

I've played so much of this game and tbh it didn't feel rewarding at all. progression is such a grind it's unbearable at times but if you don't mind that then maybe this is your thing. characters fell flat a little for me so it didn't make the grind feel worth it for that either.