Charming Post-Apocalyptic Life

Edited by: Tiffany Lillie

Your adventure begins as you arrive in Portia, a quaint town with overgrown skyscrapers dotting the horizon. As you set about restoring your father’s workshop to its former glory, you’ll find that there is more to this enchanting town than meets the eye.

As you explore Portia, you’ll run into the town’s quirky residents, each of whom have their own backstories waiting to be discovered. These characters are well crafted, easily distinguishable by their unique style and personality, and have interesting histories. There are a sizeable amount of characters to befriend and plenty of options when it comes to romance, whether it be winning the heart of the sweet farm girl across the way or even romancing the boy raised by a bear. These characters are the heart and soul of Portia, adding life to the town and achieving the difficult feat of creating characters worth caring about.

The town itself is beautifully designed and the world around it is fun to explore, with hazardous wastelands, peaceful meadows, caves full of creatures, and abandoned ruins full of relics from the old world ready to be discovered. There are also engaging monthly festivals that you can participate in, which help to bring the townspeople together, as well as explain some of the history surrounding the town and the world before the apocalypse.

Running the Workshop

My Time At Portia is filled with countless hours worth of missions to complete, a good portion of which revolve around crafting things in your father’s old workshop. With the aid of various tools and machinery, you can take requests at the Commerce Guild to advance your reputation and gain much-needed funds, craft important objects for the town and the main quest line, build furniture for your fully-upgradeable home, and create a myriad of other items.

In addition to crafting, you can also set up planters and build shelters to farm and raise livestock. Though these elements are not quite as fleshed out as the crafting aspect, they do provide more options in terms of play style and can be useful when crafting items, completing missions, or advancing relationships around Portia.

Combatting the Wasteland

As charming as the town of Portia is, the wasteland surrounding it is full of dangerous monsters in need of vanquishing, as well as not-so-dangerous animals worth the loot. There are several types of creatures to fight, including thieving Bandirats, giant snail bosses, and colorful pink llamas. The combat system is relatively simple and easy to understand, utilizing an attack button, a dodge-roll button, and the normal WASD keys to run away.

One drawback of the combat system, despite its ease, is that some players might not like the more violent aspects of Portia’s mostly peaceful style of gameplay. Combat can be avoided to a certain extent, however, you might miss out on completing main missions when avoiding it. All in all, combat serves more as a way to get unique items and is more lighthearted than violent in nature, never straying too far from the bright and cheery tone throughout.

Slow-Burn Satisfaction

Though My Time At Portia does offer quick rewards for some objectives, such as completing commissions from the Commerce Guild, most of the missions require a certain amount of time and effort. You might need to take a trip to the ruins, fight some creatures, or upgrade to a better version of the workshop’s machines in order to fulfill certain quests, none of which can be done in a day. This slow-burn makes completing the quests so much more rewarding, as it truly feels like you put in enough effort to deserve the rewards.

While this type of gameplay might seem frustrating to those who prefer being able to quickly complete missions, it also helps to make My Time At Portia more addicting, as you keep coming back for more and more in your determination to finish each task. This slow-burn effect also adds to the longevity of the game, giving you ample reason to keep playing and adding hours of content.

The Flaws

As amazing as the gameplay is, My Time At Portia is not without some technical flaws. While playing on the highest graphical settings, the FPS did drop and stutter when running, especially through the busier areas of the map. This could be particularly detrimental when in combat, but it did not hinder the overall gameplay too drastically. There was also quite a bit of missing voice acting and though the text boxes did contain all of the necessary dialogue, this aspect did not feel as polished as the rest of Portia. The developers are aware of these problems and are hard at work to fix them, so it is possible these issues will be fixed before the official release.