My favorite PS4 game and one of my most favorite games of all time is called Yonder. Discovering it at PAX East last year was one of the best gaming days of my life and it was a game that I rarely put down. After I beat it, I was sad because I loved it so much and there weren't other games that were like it. There were games that were close to it, yet so far away. Then earlier this summer, I heard that My Time at Portia was very similar to Yonder, so I checked it out, and a lot of the reviews and wikis confirmed that the game was very very similar.

I bought it that very same day. I played it that same day and actually had a pretty bad experience to the point where I began to regret getting the game but starting with day 2 I fell in love with it and never looked back.

GRAPHICS: 10/10

The graphics of Portia are so good. My favorite thing about the graphics is the artwork that is shown on loading screens. I love the art style and most of the game is so cute looking. There's only one small problem with the graphics on this version of the game. Every now and then the animations will lag. I could play for 10 minutes and the game would pause like 3 times, but only for like half a second so it doesn't hurt gameplay much.

Other than that, the world is so cute and fun to look at, graphics gets a perfect grade from me.

SOUND: 9/10

The sound aspect would have easily been a 10 out of 10, but having seen the PC version of Portia, I know that a lot has been taking out of this version sound wise. In the PC version, there's a ton of voice acting. Pretty much all dialogue has a voice attached to it, but the Switch version drops all voices. But other than that, there are still a ton of other sounds that help the game feel immersive and the music is great too.

After playing the game for just a couple days, I had some of the tunes stuck in my head. This time, the game gets a near perfect 9 out of 10.

ADDICTIVENESS: 10/10

The game is so much fun and it's difficult to get bored if you have a plan. The game runs on a set day night cycle which means you can't be out all night and stores are open at certain times of days. This is a lot like Persona and Stardew Valley. How did I get around this? I didn't, the game made me prioritze what I wanted to do. As I was loading into a new day, I had to make a set plan. First I would go and buy flowers. Then I sell some excess food. Then I give the flowers to the love of my life. Then I would go and do other stuff.

I had my activities planned a day in advance so it's really combining aspects of puzzles with the game as well, and that's not a problem. You can end up spending hours working on relationships, hours on fighting, hours on mining, and so much more. Once you "beat the game" maybe there won't be a reason to play more. But let's be serious, it could literally take you 1,000 hours to do everything, so you won't really have to worry about replayability.

STORY: N/A

There's a story for sure, but I feel like if you don't pay attention to it as much and focus on the building and the farming, and the relationships, the game might actually be more fun. What's the game about?

1. You end up in a weird post apocalyptic place called Portia.
2. Everyone is super friendly. Except for that one guy. And those 2 others. And that cat.
3. People pay you to build stuff. Simple things like chairs and more complex stuff like "buses", bridges, and weird doohickeys.

Through random interactions and other means, you learn about the world, and the different regions, and what happened to the world. It's not all that important and to me, it's just cramming a lot of world building basically in the way of textbook readings. You can study everything if that's your thing but you can also just play the game for hundreds of hours and not need to know about what's going on 100 percent of the time.

DEPTH: 10/10

There is SO MUCH TO DO. First you have the relationships. I literally spent 2 weeks focusing on one NPC. I gave them a gift they like every day and talked to them every day. My relationship bar went up just 1 point. If you want to level up your relationship with everyone, it's going to take hundreds of hours of chatting and buying gifts. The relationship building is intense. It's a lot like the social ranks from Persona but with a lot more characters and way more in depth. Everything you do will affect your relationship with someone and there's a total of 10 relationship levels. You can give people gifts or talk to them, or even build them stuff and your relationship changes. With different relationship levels with different people, you unlock different perks such as discounts and other cool things. If you try hard enough you might even be able to get married but that will take hundreds of hours of playing.

There's also so much to build. There's a gigantic database of things to build and not only do you build them to make your life better, but you make things to progress in missions and as commissions for NPC's, so there's a lot of money and prestige involved.

You can also mine in adandonded ruins and this is my favorite thing to do. One of the best things about mining is that you can spend in game money and the ruins will reset so you can keep mining literally forever and you will never run out of things to collect. There's also a ton of people and creatures to fight, and mini games to play like Rock Paper Scissors. The amount of stuff you can do in the game is cause for another perfect score.

DIFFICULTY: 7

For the most part, the game is super easy. Fighting is easy, and once you rank up your level and skills, and find weapons, fighting will become even easier. Mining is the same, it's super easy and straightforward. The only issue is that you have to worry about your stamina and the time. If you run out of stamina, you won't be able to fight, mine, or even pick up items anymore. Worst of all, at 3 AM, you automatically pass out and wake up the next day in your bed. This makes the game difficult because you have to be super cautious about both stamina and time, and you literally can't waste any.

There's one thing that I don't really like about the difficulty of the game and that's the complexity of the blueprints. The first major thing i had to build was a bridge. First I had to build different machines like a smelter, a grinder, and a cutter. This took a lot of time and resources. Then i had to collect a ton of items to use. The worst part is the waiting. When you're smelting or cutting, you have to wait a long time, like 1 or 2 in game days and you also need to replenish fuel. It's like smelting in Minecraft but times 10.

Building that bridge took me about 10 hours and that was one of the easiest things to build. The blueprints become bigger and more complex, they require more resources and more patience. If there was no building and the game was just farming, chatting, and living your life, the game would be five times easier. But of course, it's not a bad thing, it gives the game a unique challenge and new sense of fun.

PROS:
cool art style
Relationships
Unlimited resources
Fun

CONS:
No voice acting
Lag
Long load screens
Difficult blueprints

OVERALL: 9.6/10

When I was told that this game was like Yonder, I had a lot of high expectations. Yonder was one of my most favorite games of all time for a number of reasons, so it would be really difficult to come close. But it did. Portia is an incredibly charming game that's a ton of fun and will leave you entertained for so many hours. I feel like it's a bit on the pricey side for a farm/life/SIM, but it's so worth it because of how many hours you'll end up putting into it. Overall, my final grade for My Time at Portia for the Switch will be a 9.6 out of 10.

I admittedly dismissed this one since there are quite a few of these kinds of zen games. Stardew Valley and Kynseed have the harvest moon vibe like this one, there's also stuff like Moonlighter and Ressatear... Recitea-... Resetti, Resetti's Shop adventure, I dunno, you could say there's starting to be a bit of saturation in the market. I'm guessing you'd rank this game above those though?

Mecha Leo : Of those, I played Stardew Valley and Moonlighter. Against both of those, the one big advantage this one has is that it's 3D. There's also a lot more stuff to do.