My 'Carbon Steel Bar' at 'the Furnace.'


마이 탄소강괴 앳 용광로.

I have 136 hours in the game so at one point I did love it. Tried to go back to it today and it's unplayable - constant lags, constant crashing. Go to look up fixes and there are none; but there ARE a whole lot of people complaining about how it's been abandoned for the sequel, and the crashing/lagging is near constant. Don't know what happened, but I won't recommend this game till it can actually be played.

I loved My Time in Sandrock so I thought I'd love Portia. I was dead wrong.

- The characters are so flat and uninteresting. Emily is a farmer girl, Arlo is a Civil Corp officer, etc. You don't feel motivated to befriend anyone because what's the point? You already know everything there is to know about them from their initial introduction. Ginger is only interesting character because she's at least got some semblance of a backstory: her illness prevents her from going out in the sun and her carers are overprotective.

- It is so hard to increase relationship points. I set my birthday for the first week of Fall, two seasons after the start of the game, because by this time in Sandrock, I was already friends with mostly everyone. In Portia, I was Associate to two characters and Strangers with everyone else. Keep in mind, I wasn't going out of my way to chat to everyone and gift favorite presents every day in Sandrock. The social points were accumulated through quests and passive points from characters admiring my relics. In Sandrock, characters can admire relics even when they're placed indoors, which makes decorating easier. In Portia, admiring relics happens less frequently and they have to be placed outside to have effect.

- Everything feels so grindy. I am always low on resources like wood and relics from the abandoned mines (old parts, tempering liquid, etc). My furnaces take ages to smelt things, so it takes me ages to finish quests. Three furnaces sufficed in Sandrock. In Portia, I had 5 and even that's not enough to keep up with demand.

- The story is less interesting, too. In Sandrock, you're there to revive a dying town and there's excitement from Logan's gang from the very start. In Portia, you make lampposts and vehicles and town improvements. There's a bit of intrigue with a mystery person sabotaging your resource box, but after 30 hours of gameplay, I expected more story development. You may argue that I'm just not progressing with the main quest enough; I refer you to the point above: I am stifled by the lack of resources.

- The combat seems way more difficult than Sandrock. This might be a me thing, but I hardly died in Sandrock and that was late game when the expected level extensively exceeded my current level. I died so many times fighting that giant snail in the Amber Island cave and that was very early game.

- The graphics are far uglier in comparison to Sandrock. A subjective opinion, but it really annoyed me, especially when all the romanceable bachelors are hideous. I had such a difficult time choosing who to marry in Sandrock because there are so many wonderful candidates each with their own distinct personality and engaging backstory. In Portia, the difficulty stems from locating someone halfway decent.

I'm glad Portia exists because it's clear the developers channeled everything they learned into Sandrock and made it into a masterpiece of a game. But I cannot in good conscience recommend this, sorry.

It was not fun. The game feels like it is designed for a much younger audience.

I can't recommend this game to anyone who is a fan of the life sim or farming sim genre.

The game feels bad to control. Running and walking animations look awkward and don't feel well-synced with the movement of your character. Structures and items have odd hitboxes such that you'll be bumping into invisible walls if you stray from the established paths.

The UI is intrusive and unintuitive. It is very slow to navigate to any given menu, and they often lack the information I would expect to find. Inventory management is awkward and will comprise a good chunk of your playtime. Furthermore, there are an egregious amount of crafting stations in which you will spend another great deal of time navigating menus.

Combat consists of repeatedly clicking while the game locks your aim to the enemy and it remains permanently stun-locked until you wear down its health bar. Mining consists of repeatedly clicking to make small dents in an empty-- I exaggerate not, completely devoid of any structure or terrain design-- room made of stone. The rest of the game is running fetch quests, often involving more tedious crafting, either for money or to progress the story.

The townspeople are generally shallow and adhere to clear archetypes. They speak in 1-line non sequiturs that make little sense and tell you very little about their personality beyond what you could guess based on their design. Additionally, character animations are extremely lackluster, with their facial expressions conveying nothing beyond, perhaps, a deep dissatisfaction and longing, not dissimilar to the feeling 10 hours in this game left me with. I'd also like to say that I found the design of the townspeople bizarre. They look lifeless and generic yet their designs feel busy and unappealing to look at. Another bizarre choice was including a height and weight statistic for every NPC, and specifying all save for maybe 1 bachelorette to be very underweight, though this wasn't the case for the bachelors. Why even bother to include this information? I felt slightly uncomfortable with every women designed as overly thin with conventionally attractive features while the men had more varied and humorous designs. This is especially apparent in the older townsfolk who are not romanceable.

Also, the dialog and other text in this game is horribly written. The developers appear to think that that commas and periods are interchangeable forms of punctuation. Perhaps this is just a pet peeve of mine, but I don't think this amount of grammatical error is acceptable for a game with very simple, limited dialog that costs $30.

I was initially excited by the world, and I enjoy the design of the town and surrounding fields and ruins. The juxtaposition of the thriving farming village and ruined skyscrapers reclaimed by nature makes an interesting backdrop. But, I was quickly disappointed to realize that these ruins are either completely empty or simply serve as a teleport point to one of the aforementioned empty stone rooms to mine in. On the subject of the design of the world, I must also mention that everything is poorly proportioned. Doors tend to be 2 to 10 times the height of your character, and many buildings contain vast empty rooms that do not even nearly correlate to the size of the building's outside. The massive scale of the world is also apparent in the fact that NPCs who exit the town will sprint to every location, presumably because the world is too large for them to have a meaningful schedule if they can only move at a walking pace.

There are other gripes I have about this game that I will leave out for the sake of brevity. Overall, it's poorly designed and lacks the charm many games in this genre have. Save your time and money and play something else.

Really liked this game. Easy play !

I have hundreds of hours on this on Epic. I love this game, so much so, that I went ahead and bought a copy on Steam, too.
This game has amazing replayability and a "hook" that I can't quite explain, I just keep coming back

Cozy Game