I’m sorry. I know I have a problem with repetitive, unproductive, meaningless, monotonous resource management chore sims, but it was free on Game Pass. “Just ten minutes,” I promised myself. “Just to try it out. Just twenty minutes, thirty tops, maybe an hour or so – but that’s it.”
But it wasn’t.
My Time at Portia is a lot like Stardew Valley, it’s not even subtle about it, so I can’t pretend this was some kind of mistake. Okay, so instead of a farm, it’s a workshop, and instead of Sebastian, it’s this pretentious snob Gust, but now I’m making excuses because Sebastian was actually also a pretentious snob. I can’t even tell you that My Time at Portia innovates or improves much on the genre – it’s more of the same. I mean, it’s the more of the same, but it’s also got more of those same things. More junk to accumulate. More stuff to build. More totally incompetent locals who keep asking me to help them out with super basic shit like “please cook this soup that my grammy used to make us, it’s a secret family recipe but I can’t make it myself for some reason, lol”. It’s fish and two other ingredients chosen entirely at random, Dawa, it’s not that complicated.
One of Portia’s residents is a talking bear in pyjamas. “Yo, what’s up with the talking bear in pyjamas?” isn’t ever a dialogue choice with other NPCs, but I guess that’s the wrong question, anyway. “Yo, where can I get some dank weed?” is probably unavailable until I increase my rep.
Gotta finish this wind turbine and upgrade my chicken coop first, though. So I gotta finish the bus station and the generator and Arlo’s spaghetti, process the copper ore – fuck, I’m out of copper ore. So I gotta go mine the copper ore, but fuck, I’m also out of tempering liquid. FUCK.
Tempering liquid is the worst. It’s dropped by Plierimps and Chemical Dropouts in the Sewage Plant, but that’s a detour of about four in-game hours and if I don’t queue up this concrete by 02:00, I won’t finish the conveyor project before my date with Gust tomorrow. What? It’s not like Portia’s bachelor scene has options, and besides, he has a pet pig. Sebastian didn’t have a pet pig. This time, mom, it’s gonna be different.
Gimme twenty minutes.
Thirty tops.
Maybe an hour or so…