My Time at Portia

My Time at Portia is a crafting sim that, to its credit, does try to differentiate from Stardew Valley by focusing on building. There is a bit of a learning curve (I didn’t quite grok mining at first) and the game expects you to explore the workbook and menus and sort out an early building strategy, which is fine. Most of the NPCs seem fairly mundane and uninteresting, but I think what kills this one for me is the abundance of crafting timers. I feel like I’m always waiting around to craft the most basic ingredients, only to wait even more after to craft those into something else. If the crux of the game is crafting, early pacing should be determined by ingredient rarity or volume rather than timers.

Bad Port Woes

The Nintendo Switch version recently went on sale for $3, so I decided to give this another go. Donut got to it first and evidently rage-quit within 5 minutes. When I fired it up later that night, I understood why. It’s a bad port. It has clunky controls and long load times and stutters, the graphics look weirdly rezzed down. What a waste of time. If I’d paid more than $3 I’d be genuinely annoyed.

As it is, I’m a little annoyed I did some preliminary research and the reviews did not indicate how crappy this port is. The same thing happened with Don’t Starve Together for Nintendo Switch. The game is essentially unplayable due to load times, and I was glad I paid less than $2 for it. We’re all playing on the same hardware, here. If there’s a performance issue on a multi-platform game, I want to know that up-front.