My Time at Portia (2019)

I bought this game during the Steam Spring Sale a couple of years ago. For about two weeks I played it in a way that can only be described as "obsessively." I played every single day, and it consumed all of my free time and then some as I blew off other stuff I really should have been doing.

Then I finally put it down for a couple of days when I had some obligations that I couldn't blow off, and with about 48 hours of detox separating me from the last session, I realized I hadn't even been enjoying it that much. I was mainly just hooked on the Skinner Box mechanics.

(For those who don't know, a Skinner Box is a device that was used in lab animal experiments. An animal, usually a rat, was placed in a box which has various levers it can press. For pressing each different lever, the animal is either rewarded with high-value food, or punished with harsh stimuli like electric shock or loud noises. Researchers used these boxes to study how punishment and reward can shape behavior, an approach known as "operant conditioning.")

Like a Skinner box, this game kept giving me a steady stream of constant dopamine rewards for almost any lever I pushed, no matter how trivial. Rather than punish me for pushing the wrong levers, it punished me for not pushing levers often enough. The very tight time constraints on missions meant that any time spent idle, or even just unoptimized, could result in failing missions. Because of this I felt a constant drive to do as much as possible, as efficiently as possible, to the extent that I completely lost sight of whether the stuff I was doing was even particularly fun or if it was just keeping me busy.

To be fair, the game did have a few bright spots. I genuinely enjoyed riding the llamas, with their bouncy gait and their dopey little faces. But those moments of pure joy were pretty rare. The variety of processing machines and different types of things you could make was cool, even if the actual process of using the machines was implemented in a way that made them feel more like a chore than an asset.

Most glaringly, the NPC villagers were incredibly flat and bland. I could not bring myself to care about a single one of them despite how many there were to choose from. The only character who was remotely interesting was the robot butler, since he actually has a short story arc - but once it finishes he's about as boring as the rest. This kind of game absolutely needs to have interesting characters and MTAP just fell way short of the mark. There was some kind of main narrative too, but 2 years removed I don't even really remember what it was anymore - it was that forgettable.

Overall, I came away from this game feeling much like a person stepping out of a Vegas casino on Monday and seeing sunlight for the first time since Friday, feeling vaguely ashamed and regretful. As desperate as I had been to get back to my tasks during that 2-week blur, I never actually wanted to do the tasks, I just wanted the rewards.

I never picked the game up again.

I have sunk 25 hours into this and the more I play it, the more I find it tedious. The main problem is that the game`s main focus is building, which is terribly inefficient, and everything else is so lackluster that you cant even go do other things and have fun while you wait for things to craft.

Every machine requires so many materials, they take in-game time to craft and it crafts one-by-one. You get 1 carbon steel bar every 2 in-game hours. It was fine in the beggining, when materials werent so complex and it took less time to craft but as you progress and start to unlock complex structures, it feels bad man. Not to mention that those bars you made and waited 2 days for now need to be refined into other materials, which will also take you two days. Of course I have multiple furnaces but even then my cycle looks something like this:

• wake up, look at what I need for the quest
• fire up 60 carbon steel bars on two furnaces, fire charcoal on other furnaces bcz you need it to craft the bars, fire everything else on other furnaces
• go to sleep
• wake up, you only have 12 bars done, refuel furnaces with wood, take the materials produced to other machines which will then refine them into other things which will also take 3 days
• if out of ore or wood, go mine and cut down trees
• constantly babysit your furnaces
• go to sleep
• when its done go complete the quest
• wait for another quest and repeat

There are other activities that I could do while my things are crafting instead of just sleeping but they are so boring and unrewarding:

• mining and relic hunting - you pay to mine these big rooms full of stone with nothing else in it and have glasses that scan for relics to dig up. completing one set of relics gives you that relic as a decoration or you can put it into the museum later but its whatever. i cannot be assed to decorate when it also takes so many materials to make your workshop look nice and I cannot stand having to mine in that blank room for days just to complete one set piece and partially discover 50 more.
• dating and gift giving - it takes so many points to level up from a mere stranger to acquaintances and the characters dont give you any incentive to want to get to know them or romance them.
• dungeon fighting - you just have to be equipped with good weapons, a ton of health items and try to continuously attack them to stun-lock them to death. the enemies are always the same. dungeons have lackluster layouts and the loot is always the same, just more materials for more crafting.
• farming, ranching and fishing - no point to it unless you need something for crafting, a quest or you just want your workshop to look nice.
• building commissions - just more crafting. it raises your reputation and you get rewards at the end of each month based on your rank. the rewards are more crafting items and money.
• monthly festivals - you participate in special events which grants you badges that you spend on decor pieces particular for that theme. i have no will to decorate, this game drained me.
• side quests - which require more crafting or fetching

Part of me wants to continue and complete the main questline because it seems interesting but I am so drained. Maybe I will pick it up sporadically and play for like an hour at a time but for now im heading to greener pastures.

Up next for me is completing Thimbleweed Park and Tails Noir, while suffering in Oxygen not included and trying to not feel stupid as fuck because I dont understand 90% of that game.

Hours played : 145 hours

I really liked this game ! I fell in love with the florist, offered her gifts every day, probably the flowers I was buying from her just the minute before, she loved the attention anyway and we ended up happily married.

Before the love of my life moved in, I was doing everything by myself. Farming, gathering things, renovating my old house, building so many weird machines and stuff, taking care of cute animals. It was a full time job for sure.

When my wife moved in she helped me a lot in the daily routine. It was like having a second youth, all the time I had for myself to explore and live new adventures in the big world (the map is large). Then there was the side story with the robot and all that drama, and after a while the robot asked me if I wanted help at my farm, so I said yes. I wish I didn't because my wife stopped helping me, and the robot was way less efficient. So I stopped playing the game, and never finished it. But I had a really great time before that.

I loved going everyday to the village saying hello to each and everyone of the village people, the town's event, all the animals are super cool, building things was awesome, I love the change of the seasons, all the backstory of being the best builder in town works well.

I enjoyed very much the relationship system and the slow building to get to know the other villagers and then become friends. I was feeling that my character was super polite and very respectful, saying hello to everyone everyday (that was my way to do it). It really gave me the impression of being the new one in the village myself, and little by little taking my marks and really getting to know the people. I loved the romantic dates. It was so very cute.

And I loved my birthday (ohhhh best day ever !! Thank you for making this day so cool. It is the first time they asked my birthday date in a video game and really did something great for that event. Oh except for Adibou, this game made it fun too ).

I found the graphics beautiful, and it was nice to run around the map, discovering new areas all along the game. The lifespan of the game is really long, I didn't even finish it after my 145 hours on the clock.

(This is a mini-review as part of my holiday project to try out as many games on my wishlist during the Steam Sales, and then getting them refunded if I don't think I will play them. In short: demo time!)

Played: 42 mins

Evaluation: I love farming games, I binged the turnips out of Stardew Valley. But this 3-D version just doesn't do it for me. I had the same with Slime Rancher — the aesthetic is not my thing, moving around feels clunky, and I have a hard time getting into it. It probably doesn't help that I game on a standing desk, so games need to absorb me and keep me up, not relax me and make me want to leisurely lie back and pick up some pieces of wood.

Is it a keeper? Nope. Next!

• Year played: 2019
• Playtime: 10-15 hours
• Completion level: enough to see that it was just going to be more of the same for the rest of the game

This was a game that I really wanted to love, but I just... didn't. It seemed like it would be the 3D stardew valley/harvest moon of my dreams, but it ended up being a sort of bland, poorly optimized, kind of dull game, with freaky unappealing character art.

It did have enough going for it that I probably would have sunk a lot more time in it, if it weren't for how absolutely atrocious this game runs on the switch. 30-40 second load times every time you enter or exit a building. 20 seconds or more every time I opened my inventory. Another 10 seconds every time I tried to change panels in the inventory view. It makes you not want to engage with anything in the game or visit any of the NPCs because you'd have to wait so damn long for the loading times just to go in their house.

The game had a couple of neat mechanics, in particular I thought the mining was interesting - it's voxel based, and you can dig in any direction you want, with a sort of metal detector thing you can use to track down hidden loot - but none of those were interesting enough for me to get past how terrible this game runs on the switch. Maybe if I'd bought it on PC I'd have a different opinion, but there is no way this game should have ever been released on switch in the state that it was.

Oh and did I mention that the art style is really unappealing? Some of these characters are nightmare fuel. I liked the fat pink cat though.

here it is, the game that inexplicably sucked 100 hours of my life into the void while being neither great nor even all that good. we don't talk about august 2020.

the good

• bright and vivid color scheme that adds to the deceptively carefree atmosphere
• expansive world that progressively opens up as you reach milestones
• lots of items to create and collect
• a pet dog and cat

the complicated

• the gameplay is a mix of stardew valley and more traditional sim games where you grind for items by building them within specific systems. there are a lot of different machines with different timers and compatibilities to work with as you progress through the game, and pretty much all you'll be doing later on is keeping track of all of them: which one is making what, the entire chain of production from block of wood to finished product, etc. if you enjoy that sort of thing (and are willing to pull out a pen and paper for it, because you'll likely need to at some point), this game will be a blast to you for a good while. the grind eventually grew stale for me, but before that, this part is what kept me entertained for most of the journey.
• i found the 3d graphics charming when i played it, but i can't deny that they were very obviously made by a smaller company. there were no major glitches to speak of during my playthrough, but everything still looked a bit awkward and early-2000s pixar.

the bad

• animations are poorly done and sometimes nonexistent
• the social system is boring and to me there was only one character that was even interesting enough to attempt to romance
• the grind will put most people off because it quickly becomes prohibitively intense and requires high optimization in order to progress through the game

my time at portia is, for the most part, a game for people who enjoy busy and complicated gameplay as a main focus. it's definitely not the most complex game i've played (not by far), but for its particular genre, it goes pretty far down the rabbit hole.

Intro

MTAP is a third-person village game. You arrive in a village, get a house and meet some people. You have to gather resources (cut/mine/farm/hunt/fish), build stuff and do quests involving those two things. There's also a village with people you can interact with.

Review

This is Stardew Valley but in 3D and worse. Stardew is a 4-star game held back by poor design. MTAP is just a 2-star game. It's ten times grindier (i know, it sounds impossible) and lacks all the charm of Stardew. You have to use the Wiki even more because not only is it as vague as Starfew, it also has half a dozen clunky workbenches so you don't always know which one to use. Et cetera.

While MTAP isn't as big on doing chores and doesn't severly punish you for not going to bed in time (you don't get robbed), it does make you pay to access the mines which puts a similar pressure on you to "get stuff done". I can't relax if the game makes me feel like i'm wasting money by not getting the most out of my mine-pass. I practically stopped farming in Stardew at some point for the same reason.

There are other flaws too, like the excessive loading times (even with a SSD!), but the grinding is what really kills it. This type of game has to make you feel like you're making progress. In Stardew you quickly have a small farm and clearing stones/grass makes it look nicer and feels useful. After 8 hours of MTAP i just had a stupid-looking house full of identical couches and clocks (those give stat bonuses) and stupid-looking yard filled with workbenches. The mines don't really have levels (you can randomly generate a new "level" for 20 gold) so no "accomplishment" there either. The skill tree is just a bunch of generic bonuses too ("25% less stamina to cut trees").

It's just not worth it.

Graphics and 2.5D aside I see little resemblance.. Quite cute graphics and characters, a fair amount of things to do at least for a short while. The game revolves around accepting quests from the villagers and crafting to fulfill those requests, which is one of this games biggest shortcomings. The concept is fine, but crafting itself consists mostly of throwing materials at a crafting table and just waiting hours and hours of in-game time. What should be the main attraction of the game simply is not fun after the first couple hours of gameplay.

It would also be nice to see the characters be utilized better. Now only few of them get any proper attention, which is sad considering the vast amount of characters in the game -- not to mention the lack of incentive to actually befriend any of the villagers considering how long it takes to get them to like you. I think that the mining "mini game" could be improved. Moving around the mines feels a bit buggy and it is hard at times to properly assess what and how far you are hitting.

I'm sure this will appeal to a large number of people, but it's much too linear that you think it is when you start, and that's unfortunate because with more freedom it could suck me in further. All that said, the game play is generally fun but it quickly turns into a slog-fest, especially finding characters to complete quests.

Sigh

The Switch port for this is just...so bad. It's so laggy. It feels like one of those bad PC games that they advertise on TV so that kids will play it and then it ends up being a money grabber. My Time at Portia isn't a money grabber, but it definitely has the gameplay of one. I was excited for this because it looked really cool, but the Switch port is basically unplayable. Maybe it will get patched later. For now, it's going off my "playing' shelf.

I bought the game yesterday morning and proceeded to spend FIFTEEN HOURS playing it.

I'm not even finished with the 2nd season. I glanced at the achievements and was like "YOU CAN HAVE FACTORIES? THERE'S 50 DIFFERENT ASSEMBLY DESIGNS? I ONLY HAVE LIKE 5. I'm 2 seasons in and don't even have one heart/star with any of the villagers, out of like... 10. This game is so much fun and there's so much to do and it's so cute OMG.