Even though at first glance the game imparts an infantile impression, it deceives the body inconspicuously, so do not be laughed by the lack of flexibility. Like Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley, My Time at Portia also offers a great amount of fun with powerful game features that can be pulled even more by other, mature games. But it also has shortcomings.
The plot is not the one that would remain in your mind longer than during the animated sequence. After the death of your father, your steps take you to the island of Portia, where you left a small and time-consuming house. Life on a remote island is like an idyll: the inhabitants of the Portion have a constantly good mood, no one is worried, no one is missing, all live happily in the world that has been devastated, what you will learn later when you search underground. It is up to you where you choose, inconspicuous appointments given by the mayor or other NPCs with the assignment of the main and side tasks. And there are dangerous zones, references to the forgotten past, but the story and the environment in the background. You do not have to deal with storyline tasks at all.
In the beginning, you see the adventures left by the third person in the vast world. Go and bring it, try to make this. Whether it is an ax, a rake or other object or a particular machine that you will later use, it will teach you at least the foundation. My Time at Portia is basically grinding basic raw materials. Infinite, inexorable and hard grinded. Raw material is a nuisance, you rarely need better tools, or you can pick dangerous places, but the Minecraft principles are clear gaming mechanisms. And cute processing. Unlike the apocalyptic predictions of the gloomy world, Portia is cheerful, dear and romantic. So you do not get out of too much candy. It would be a pity.
So what can you do in Portia? If you omit the burden of tasks that you get from the mayor or other important characters, and we're going for the main tasks, there are dozens of smaller, but not negligible, forward shifts. At least in order to increase the sympathy of individual townspeople. There are dozens of them, you change each of them, you play with them (stone, paper, scissors, battle or five-quills) or you give them. Building relationships is voluntary, but you are gradually getting married through a long-term socialization. It requires many days, weeks and months of honest court, but there is a possibility here.
However, your first steps will lead you to nature to get to know the surrounding countryside. The range is rather smaller, but it does not hinder it at all. You can find everything important in the nearby area. On earth, small commodities such as wood, stone, strawberries, herbs, waste, and the like are restored once a day. The surrounding trees are afraid of your axes (you need an improved version for larger trees), but it is better to dig in them. Fruits fall apples or other fruits or different objects. You can monetize or confiscate. A few days you will explore exploration of individual principles, search for shops and get to the first buildings.
Before building a bridge over a river, you will need material that you find in abandoned ruins. In the underground, hard work begins, so you will take a croup and roll around you. Unlike Minecraftu, you do not make angular tunnels, which results in various tortuous corridors and corners that you occasionally jam. Climbing up will help you jetpack, looking for important items hidden deep underground, stones, iron ore, soil, sand, etc. When searching for different items, special glasses with radar. The space you can process in the main abandoned ruins is gigantic and you do not think you can skip through it all the way. Stunning underground spaces are accessible for a small fee, but the material you get is spent in shops, something you use for yourself, so you can take it as a day-to-day job. Or adventure.
The cute landscape is not just that - you know, humanity is going crazy, mastering artificial intelligence and robots, everything is over. So, in Portia, they try to restart, forget about all the modern technology, they live in connection with nature, but somewhere in the underground you get the artifacts of the past. Zíííív. But it also means that you do not just have to live for joy or to have someone in the square from clear friendship to the post. At least from the beginning. You shoot the enemy and you can fool it. And he's you. And you his. So, the primitive Diablo, without constantly dressing your character in better handier and armor or otherwise changing his wardrobe. Weapons are also not a million. Actually, this simple action adds to the acquisition of experience other than playing in the country or copying into the trees.
Tunnel tunneling is, unfortunately, after a time for a monotonous environment boring, but you dig to walk anyways. Fight must be taken as a necessary evil. Artist intelligence for strange enemies do not seek, nor aggressiveness. In essence, you just need to click your mouse, sometimes cure it, and that's all. It does not matter whether you buckle the stone wall or the head of an oversized lime, rainbow lamella or green slime. Additionally, there are bonus items that fall from dead enemies and you need them in your manufactory. The battles take place in cute to candy style, so you will not run a drop of blood and you will not throw a necklace from the enemy guts on your neck.
In the world of Portia, it works quite well. Occasionally, you're shooting on a mysterious artifact in the underground, where you'll be spoiling someone, but be careful not to miss them. The level of enemies over their heads is indicative of the damage they are having and how many lives they have. You do not have to be stronger just because you have to dance around them in the DarkSlovak way, which does not suit much for arcade playability and control. Simple statistics improve both your hand and the items you put in your house. You get them by production or gift, so toned stone table adds stamina, fan again energy, pink couch increases defense or attack force, and so on. You "kneel" it in the underground and on the surface, first with a wooden, later bronze sword or tennis racket (because it has higher damage) click and it is logically more advantageous with an object increasing the attack by a few points as a bunch of herbs. into the gameplay color.
As you have already pointed out, the character gradually levels you. The experience gains for everything he does, and no action is nonsensical. This principle is probably the simplest. It does not matter whether you take it from the earth ... feces, kicking in a tree, shoveling into the ground - you will always get the same amount of experience behind that crush. Perhaps for someone absurd and pointless, but it has its logic: you do not despise yourself for a terrible leveling, you lie down exactly what you are in the mood or need of as a result of fulfilling a task or building a particular subject. No matter how you do it, do whatever you want. For killed opponents, you catch a fish a little more. But just a little bit. At the end it climbs, move up a level above, and get a point to divide into three tree skills.
Here it is a bit harder for us, but still so gently that mainstream (and game reviewers) are not too confused by complicated statistics. Improve the fight, harvest, or social component that will surprise you a little. You can invest several times in selected enhancements, such as stronger attack, higher defense, quicker experience, more efficient raw material mining, less material consumption in production, improved durability, socialization bonuses, better pricing in stores. There is a sea and you can improve each of your skills several times.
Elevation levels are initially fast, later they have traditionally stabilized so that you are still driven forward, but not by constantly distracting the points of boredom. An important factor is your stamina, which each activity reduces, and when you stay at zero, you have nothing more to do than go to bed and wake up the next day full of equipment. Or scrape apples or other food so you can do something on that day. Changing the daily time has a purely cosmetic effect, so it sometimes rains, sometimes sunshine, it's dark at night, the shadows of the windmill are great in conjunction with the sunset. When you decide to go to count the sheep, it does not matter, the energy and the stamina are always filled to the maximum and wake up to the seventh. It would be so in reality. The whole cycle of a normal day is therefore on your balance of what you want to do, what you need and what you actually do and manage to do.
The choices you make about playing are not a whim. Choosing the most important thing is sometimes extremely stressful. Welcome to real life - and praise for setting the time flow in Portia. Despite the appointment, after a few hours, an unpleasant taste of monotony in the mouth may appear. Because you are doing the same thing all the time. Subjectively, I can wave my hand, as I've mostly given the game after the evenings for an hour. That time was enough for 2-3 game days, so that a man could calmly relax and manage a simple logistics of activities. However, long-term weekend visits have shown a creeping boredom as a repeat of the same.
He can not be too angry, but where Minecraft offered the construction and left open space for player fantasy, My Time at Portia is actually too restrictive. You do not build anything other than pre-prepared objects. It was not the presence of becoming a necessary condition for success, but in this way individual activities become monotonous. Just in moments when you can spend hours at Minecrafte because you make up. If there were no raw materials in the game, but the game would focus more on the gardening, no one would have thought it would refresh the gameplay. Do not take it as a cruel resentment, rather a sigh, and a warning that My Time at Portia is sometimes unbearable if you sit for hours long.
The technical processing has its flies, the game has fallen into the system a few times, which, when saving the position, will not be allowed to sleep. Pastel colors, simple architecture with a slightly curved design, manga figures with big heads, and motion animations that are smooth but with reality have nothing in common. My Time at Portia does not care about the reality and the more comfortable the whole environment is doing, despite the mild, comic-like touch. It does not work with technocratic parameters, but it all works. Thanks to the fact that the texture of the body sometimes gets stuck in the subject, except for the sometimes invisible walls in the underground there is no jamming of the objects. The music is such a sweet candy when it gets you nervous, but you can not shut it down, do not look for a dabing in the game, the sound is rather redistributive and minimalist.
My Time at Portia has clearly defined gaming principles, you will be able to see exactly what you need to position the selected object and where you get the raw materials. If you would like to go, you can still browse through the list of all available ones. For better and new semi-finished products or items you can get upgrade tools, expand by expanding your plot. It is, therefore, paradoxical that a game presenting itself as a farmer for this type of livelihood is essentially coughing and is not even effective in dealing with it. You get a few extras for the extraction of raw materials or the production of objects, and it is a miserable slap for a crop that rips for several days.
Although the resulting impression from My Time at Portia may be fatal, it is not possible to make a game of addictiveness. Not long-term, but fleeing to the world where everything is fine, it has its charm. With hardcore gaming, the need for continuous grinding is soon to emerge. But it's fun, and it's good. Content is rich enough to not know where to jump. Unlike the depressive game survival games, it's finally something sunny.