My time at Portia, developed by Panthea Games and published by Team17. This is a small single-player RPG, which will be available on January 23, 2018. We were lucky enough to be able to test it, and here are our first impressions.
Your first mission will be to create and customize your character, boy or girl. Your avatar looks very young, and the graphics reinforce a little this teen and cute side. However, do not think that this is a baby game, it is still a small RPG and you will have a mission of the utmost importance: to restore your father's workshop.
Portia is therefore the city where you will come to live, your father's workshop will be your new home: you can of course renovate and improve it over time if you have the money and the necessary materials. You will be a builder, your character will aim to craft objects for yourself but also for the inhabitants who will give you missions. You will have missions of the utmost importance and usually they will be given to you by the mayor, which will allow you in fact to advance in history and evolve. But you will also have the opportunity to collect missions on a board, it is the villagers who will ask you for an item in exchange for a reward. Moreover, by carrying out missions, you will increase your relationships with these people, you can also offer them gifts in this spirit. It gives a bit of the feeling of being in a Stardew Valley, without the farm (well at first) but with a workshop instead!
If I tell you this, it is because here too you have a stamina or stamina gauge if you prefer, this gauge will go down as you farm to recover resources. You can either eat to fill it or sleep and save your progress at the same time to retrieve it. This gauge will lengthen as you gain experience, the same goes for your life, defense or attack. Because yes, you will have some fights in the game and you can increase specific skills according to different trees (harvest, fight…) with your earned experience points.
As in any craft game, you will have to farm, stone, wood, and some animals to recover resources. Resources that will allow you to obtain more to craft objects. However as you can see on the map, there are also abandoned ruins, by going there you will recover precious minerals but also some special pieces such as data disks. If you have enough data disks and they are given to the right person, you will receive new schematics to build new objects.
The game already has a lot of potential and is not so easy, it will take you time to recover some materials for more complicated constructions! Anyway the game leaves a good impression overall, the graphics are rather pretty, and very colorful. The music is nice even if it's a bit where the problem lies, it's the same almost everywhere, it changes a little during the fights or the ruins, but there is a serious lack of music and especially sound effects! The sound effects are quite absent and we have the feeling at times that the music is present to hide this emptiness. The game is also totally in English, it's a shame, but fortunately it is not very complicated to understand! And do not expect a story worthy of a great RPG, it is mostly a Stardew Valley in a graphic style more fleshed out in life simulation mode.
Apart from these small details, the game is very pleasant and relatively rich to hope for a good game once finished. You don't see time pass when you play My time at Portia, it's the kind of restful and relaxing little game after a long day behind the controller trying to save the world.
