The name Portia means doorway or pig. Did anyone let Shakespeare know?
My Time At Portia
LIVING THE POST-APOCALYPTIC DREAM MARTIN KITTS
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go through before you arrive at the
required item. For example, hardwood
planks require a better axe to cut
down big trees, for which you’ll need
bronze, for which in turn you’ll need
to build a furnace and feed it with
copper and tin, which must be
mined elsewhere. Then you’ll need a
cutter to produce the planks, which
means building another machine to
manufacture the saw blades, etc.
Once you’ve built a few machines
you’ll have to start upgrading them
to enable the production of better
products. It takes a long time to
assemble everything required to
complete a project, not least because
there’s a frustratingly long wait period
while your automated workshop does
its thing. Smelting a small amount
of metal can take a couple of days,
followed by another day or two while
it’s processed into some other form.
We’d often spend half a day
gathering raw materials, then find
that after stoking up the machinesSet in a distant
post-technological
future where a rural
idyll sits atop the
buried ruins of the
old world, this is a
Harvest Moon-alike infused with the
current trend for crafting. Instead of
a farmer growing crops, you’ll be a
handyman building everything from
furniture to civil architecture.
Not that it doesn’t feature a little
farming, too, along with numerous
other pastimes that will swiftly
overwhelm your short, short days. My
Time At Portia is notable for the sheer
amount of stuff it contains, with a
bustling town full of people delivering
side-quests faster than they can
possibly be completed.
For a typical mission you’re given
a blueprint showing all of the various
components required. Some of the
parts might just be raw materials
like stone or wood, but more often
than not there are several steps to
there’d be no time to do much else.
Quite often, we ended up sleeping
through several days just to hurry the
thing along. It’s like one of those ‘free’
mobile games with timers designed
to be so obstructive that people will
spend real money to bypass them,
except here they’re unavoidable no
matter how rich you are.
There are mines where you can
carve tunnels through the rock and
gather relics of the old world. These
can be given to researchers who will
use them to develop life-enhancing
gadgets, or passed on to the
technophobic Church Of The Light,
which will destroy them and give you
packets of seeds. Disappointingly,
whichever choice you make doesn’t
seem to have an impact on the way
the locals perceive you.Social circle
You can talk to the townsfolk,
romance them with gifts, or play
some mini-games with them, butshort
cutWHAT IS IT?
A crafting, mining,
farming, romancing
and fighting RPG.
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
Rune Factory with a
workshop and a
cooldown timer.
WHO’S IT FOR?
Stardew Valley
enthusiasts will get
a lot of mileage out
of this.082 THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE
REVIEW