My Time At Portia

My Time at Portia is the best wholesome life simulator you can play at the moment on Switch, hands-down.

Having the chance to play it on Nintendo Switch has made the experience even more enjoyable and accessible.

My Time at Portia is a visually beautiful, charming game rich in story, lore, and personality; everything about it is made better by the jump to a portable console. While this version lacks voice acting and rumble integration, the portability and surprisingly decent load times make this a great way to discover all that Portia has to offer.

If you’re looking for a title that relieves tension instead of building it, My Time at Portia is as soothing as gaming gets. The craft-heavy life sim offers new spins on mainstays like farming, mining, and even fishing. It’s the closest gaming equivalent to a warm cup of cocoa: soothing and satisfying. If Harvest Moon and Breath of the Wild had a baby, I’m positive their beautiful brood would feel like My Time at Portia.

Despite its low performance, My Time At Portia is an interesting title thanks to its open and colorful world, a solid lore and its inhabitants, who have their own personalities that will make us fall in love.

My Time At Portia is a game full of varied and fun missions, endearing NPCs and a charming atmosphere that allows us to spend hours and hours in the city without getting bored. If you like this kind of games, titles like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley you will love losing you among Portia's innumerable secrets.

My Time at Portia is often times an overwhelming game as a result of its own ambition. This can cause it to be intimidating and more than a little confusing at times. The quality of its many systems range from addictive to annoying. However, taken as a whole My Time at Portia is a rich world full of activity that, when played at an appropriately chill pace, will yield many hours of charming fun.

My Time At Portia is a great alternative to those farm and living games that are everywhere at the moment, but is just let down by bland presentation.

My Time at Portia is a slow game, to the point that digging around in the mines or waiting for bronze plates to smelt can be mind-numbing. But in a way its builds are kind of like knitting; repetitive and slow but visibly building towards a satisfying, tangible product. Plus, there's enough surprise in the living world, the creepy mines and dungeons and the wide fields to keep things from getting too stale for too long.

The game is very charming, and the world and the villagers are delightful, but to get the most out of My Time at Portia you might need a guide. A lot of the crafting feels like a big puzzle and most of it I was able to figure out on my own, but there is a lot going on here and it can begin to feel a little overwhelming. There’s a lot to like here, but unfortunately those few disappointments really let an otherwise lovely game down.

My Time At Portia is an ambitious game that actually delivers on what it sets out to do. The crafting can be extremely overwhelming at first and the presence of some in-game timers can be a mild annoyance, but get your head round its detailed multi-step building missions and you’ll end up with a game that could end up racking hundreds of hours on your Switch.

At this point, I’d hold off on the Switch port unless you have absolutely no other platform to play it on. I always prefer playing these kinds of games on a portable but the performance issues, input lag, and load times make this not much fun. My experience on Xbox One has been the opposite and I’m even more addicted to this than I was with Stardew Valley in my initial hours across both games. With over 30 hours played across Xbox One and Switch, I can’t wait to see it improve over time on both platforms and hopefully it is fixed for portable play on the Switch.

My Time at Portia is without a doubt an ambitious game, with plenty of places to go and a myriad of things to do. So it only feels frustrating to see that its long loading times can harm the player's experience and its overall presence on the Nintendo Switch feels like a PC game that was copied onto a console format, especially when it comes to its controls, as this turns out to be a game which only big fans of simulations of this kind will truly enjoy.

The ruins of a time long forgotten will always darken the horizon, and there'll be a part of you that wonders what more there could have been before you find yourself shunted to the next life goal in a long series of life goals. That feeling is unfortunately hard to shake, and it's a shame that there's not as much to the world of Portia as first appears.

Something hard to define is missing from My Time at Portia. It mechanically ticks many boxes that simple-life fantasies are supposed to, but it lacks the charm and satisfaction that springs from its peers in the genre. It demands your time without enticing you, and places you in a world that feels hollow. Games like this are supposed to make chores fun and rewarding, but playing My Time at Portia feels more like actual work.

While My Time at Portia has some great ideas, performance issues hold the Switch version back. [Issue #40 – July/August 2019, p. 69]