My Time at Portia

 My Time at Portia is game that was originally released in 2018. This game was the result of a successful kickstarter campaign, as far as I know. In the game you move to a cozy little town of Portia where you manage a workshop where you can build all sorts of different items, either to the different people of Portia in the form of commissions or to the town as a part of larger projects. The game is still receiving new content so you won't run out of things to do.

Story

The story starts of as you move to Portia to the old workshop your father, who you haven't seen in a long time, left you. The story then progresses as you open up new areas in the form of different projects that the major set up since he wants to develop Portia to be the center of all of the free cities. The game is set in a sort of post apocalyptic world but it isn't anything you would see in a Fallout game, rather it is after the world has cleared out of all of the nasty things and is again very pleasant and people are re-settling it. This means that there are a lot of "old world" artifacts to discover, one of them being an AI called the all source, which the latter half of the story is more focused on. 

Gameplay

The core gameplay is very simple but also very addictive. You manage a workshop and you create different items that the town or the citizens need. Either you can directly create these on a worktable, if you have all the materials required, or on a more complex building platform that often requires parts created by some of your other machines such as the sawmill or the rolling machine. To acquire these required materials you need to either mine for them in old ruins, as is the case for most ores or old world items such as a circuit board. Other main way to acquire materials is to cut down trees that are all around the world. You can also do some farming to gather some resources, but as your workshop has quite limited space for different buildings or farm plots it really is easier to just kill neutral or hostile animals for animal goods. Lastly you can buy some materials but this is not recommended as it will cost you money, and you will be needing a lot of that as the game progresses. So most of your days will be either collecting materials, or crafting. It can be quite boring at states but later on a lot of these processes will be possible to automate to a degree. 

Another gameplay aspect is relationships with different people. You can do quests for people, or gift them items you have made, or just any old junk to try and increase your reputation with them. Increasing reputation gives a variety of different bonuses depending on the people you increase it with. The end game being able to find a suitable husband or a wife that you can marry and move in with you. 

And this game also has a lot of excitement in the form of combat. You will encounter a lot of different enemies in the different old world places that you visit and at the end of them usually a boss fight. The bosses can be quite hard to kill if your gear isn't up to date, or even with better equipment but it is quite easy to learn the different patterns that the bosses attack in with some exceptions. 

Open world

The world of Portia is quite beautiful but on the design front there have been made a few mistakes on this part. As the story progresses, the world also opens more and more. Travelling it can be quite slow even with a mount. Very early in the game you unlock the option to fast travel but this takes in game time from your already short days. Some issues I found was being able to access an area that I had not yet unlocked, but unlocked a different area that let me access this "locked" area. This would have not been a huge problem if there was another way out of this place but the walls to this "still locked" area were full of invisible walls and I took my time to finally get out of there. Another issue I had with invisible walls was in the late game where I unlocked a certain type of travel and encountered invisible walls in places that had no reason to have them.

Comparison to previous one

There is no previous game in this franchise but there are is another game coming after this called "my time at sandrock". Sandrock being another city set in the same universe and I can't wait to get my hands on that one.

The review

This game is one of the best ones that I have played recently. For two weeks I did nothing else but play this game and after 70+ hours I finally completed the main story. For what it costs, this game is absolutely worth it, and it has much more content beyond that 70+ hours. The only reason I had to uninstall after the main story was because it had completely swallowed up my life and I have other things to do as well. If it wasn't for the invisible walls and minor bugs I would have given this game a solid ten but for now it is a 9/10