The first time I ever read about My Time at Portia, it was described as being inspired by Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, and Dark Cloud 2 with the magic of Studio Ghibli. While I’ve never really gotten into the likes of the first two series, I played a ton of both Dark Cloud games, and as I’ve mentioned, I love Studio Ghibli. And honestly, the trailer looked pretty neat, so here we are with me having played a few hours of the alpha available for Kickstarter backers.
The game starts off similarly to any game in this manner – you come to a new town, you are given a house (it happens to belong to the family), and then you have to build your reputation from nothing. While I haven’t played Harvest Moon (blasphemy, I know), I have watched my wife play hours of Stardew Valley, and this is essentially that if it was 3D. You’ll be building tools to harvest materials from the world while also collecting stuff on the ground. As you use your tools, you’ll deplete your SP (basically stamina for chopping, mining, fighting) which you can regain in a few ways, although the most obvious is going to sleep.
Shortly after being given your builder’s license, you’ll be tasked with several missions that involve building. At the moment in its alpha state, the whole direction of the game is a bit vague. It may be because I was tired while playing it, but shortly after starting the game you leave your house, go into town, and are then asked to return to your house. I could not find my house until 2 am the next day. Having finally found where I needed to be to start building, I realized I hadn’t collected any stone or wood that I needed, and then collapsed and woke up four hours later in my busted up house. The character (Marco) complained about the house not being well insulated, although I’m not sure my fixing it did much – perhaps he recovered more SP when I slept in it after? In any case, while I didn’t find anything to pick up while exploring every place I could go while looking for my house, I never saw any wood or stone like I conveniently found surrounding the house.
Despite the trouble I had finding my house as there wasn’t a distinct marker on the mini-map like there is for every other location I needed to go to, the game did a decent job of telling me where to go for missions. I expect a lot of the issues I ran into are exclusive to the alpha state, as the game is pretty large and will take a bit of Q&A. Luckily, with backers having access to a build of the game, it should expedite this process quite a bit, assuming they send in their feedback. The fact that it’ll be available in Early Access on Steam come January 23rd, 2018 should also help that matter.
The game is playable with a mouse and keyboard or a controller. I used a controller because I had planned on streaming it, and that’s honestly my preferred method based on all the years I’ve grown up playing consoles. I can say that the controls were responsive for the most part, although there was a bit of lag in the menu systems and selections. Also, the graphical options were automatically set to the highest with a 4K resolution at 30FPS. I noticed some lag on my rig, and when I turned everything to low, there wasn’t a whole lot of difference, so optimization doesn’t appear to be great at the moment, but I wouldn’t expect it to be. As stated, the game is in alpha – there’s a lot to be done, but the groundwork that’s been laid is excellent if you’re a fan of this type of game.
While I’ve never been sucked into the idea of farming in a game (actual farming, I’m all for grinding in an RPG), I can definitely see the appeal in a game like this that offers so much. There’s something here to satisfy that progression itch so many people have a hard to time scratching. There’s currently a demo available on Steam as well as itch.io if you want to give the game a try. If you’re a fan of the genre, I’d definitely recommend you watch out for this one.