My Time At Portia

If you've played games like Stardew or the HM Rune Factory games you know what you're getting into here. The game looks nice and there's lots of do. It's MUCH more focused on resource gathering than farming though. It does do a good job of making it feel more like you're running a business taking commissons for the bulk of your money, rather than just jamming vegetables into a mystery bin every few days. The combat, while extremely simple compared to any real arpg, is at least a bit more involved than it was in Stardew. Having a skill tree is welcome as well, making progression feel better. There's some clear 'this wasn't really finished' issues though. Some lines are voiced, but many are not. Even in the same conversation, one line might be voiced while the next isn't. There were a lot of major bugs, and while it being supported post-launch I personally got stuck twice (it literally warped me into a room with no exit in the sewage plant dungeon). There's also no saving except when you sleep. This is 2019, come on now. My one major complaint though is the sheer amount of waiting. Only a handful of items can be processed immediately, the rest require hours of in-game crafting time. Making a stack of 10 takes a full day of game time, and it only gets worse as you get to more advanced materials. You can make multiple furnances of course, but they all require constant supplies of wood to keep running. It got to the point where my 'day' would be (literally) clearcutting the nearly woods, slamming a bunch of raw materials in to be processed, and then going to sleep. Sure there's no time limit on the big jobs, but there's still no reason for all the waiting. Don't get me wrong, I still had fun playing it, but I really think this would benefit from a mod that cut waiting times down and cut the amount of raw materials needed. It really starts to feel like some decisions were made to pad the running time rather than be fun, a problem I never felt with Stardew.

Very nice, calming sandbox game where there's always something new to do or explore. The pacing feels just about right (even if waiting for those metal bars to smelt can be sometimes a bit tedious). Portia is great for weekday evenings when you just want to unwind after work with something that isn't too fast-paced nor super demanding, but not brainless either. Can definitely recommend.

I read the reviews, but I found info online that said that Gog change logs were now the same version as steam now. Nope. doesn't seem that way. I bought the game today and checked the change log (which I could not see until I bought the game). Aug 19 2019 is the last update I can see on Gog. On my partners steam account? updates in April 2020, May, June and the latest on July 30th. Gog users are peeved and rightly so. On the games steam discussion page, Gog users asked when Gog would get their update. The developer, Pathea games responded on 06 May, saying thanks for the information, we will look into that, followed by, our publisher just told us they are doing the test and translation，we hope it can be updated by end of this month. That was nearly 3 months ago now. All I hear are crickets..........

Lovely little game if you don't mind a bit of grind. What completely ruins it however, is lack of sounds like wind, weather, water, animals, etc. Turn down the repetitive music and you suddenly have a completely dead world... or a silent film from year 1895. Very poor design choice there.

Steam has now gotten 6 patches (as of 1/27/19) to fix many broken quests. Some of them are gamebreaking. The only response you get from this Developer is "later" or "soon". This has been going on for over a week. If you really want to play this game, don't buy it here.