For a couple of hours, My Time At Portia showed me that I could potentially get into a life/farm management game. I had written off the genre long ago (as in, back when the original Harvest Moon was the only real option) and never bothered checking in after that to see if I could properly appreciate the slower-paced gameplay. If the couple of hours I spent with My Time At Portia is any indication, it’s likely that I could. This game just won’t be the one that wins me over. My Time At Portia is an incredibly clunky game despite boasting a baffling high user rating on Steam; the animations are awkward, it’s rarely clear how to obtain the materials you need, and I despise the “automatically wake up in your bed if you stay up past 3 AM” mechanic beyond words. The voice acting is also drowned out by the music, which is merciful given its largely amateurish quality.

Still, there were a few moments that I really enjoyed. Creating a character was a fun process because I was able to make a blue-lipped, face-tattooed character with a seafoam-colored beard. I named him Serialkiller (all one word to work around the character limit). The opening cinematic has a conversation between a boat operator and your character where the boat guy asks if you’re going to explore ruins and your character responds “something like that.” The unintended and thoroughly creepy subtext in this interaction is pure magic.

I spent some time collecting wood and stone, built an ax and pickax to collect more wood and stone, and fixed up the main character’s dilapidated house. That increases the amount of energy they have to use per day. Then I named my workshop something profane because Portia’s cheeriness was in need of a little edge, after which I went around collecting and gifting feces to random residents and fistfighting them when they expressed displeasure with my gift. That’s probably not a viable long-term strategy, but I’m fighting the clock on my Game Pass subscription and won’t be finishing this one anyway. Weirdly enough, fighting people increases your reputation with them because it’s apparently sporting to beat the crap out of a school teacher. My Time At Portia is a weirdly positive game.

Eventually, I got some contracts that required building things, but those things required first building something else. Other items that I needed weren’t in the crafting list, so they apparently have to be found in the world, and My Time At Portia‘s world is far larger than it has any right to be. Getting from point A to point B is always a boring run through empty space. It got to the point where my tasks were an unmanageable matryoshka doll of things that required other things, all of which would require tons of blind exploration to figure out. I stopped having fun.

There were plenty of rough edges that I didn’t care for, too. The Xbox One performance is inconsistent, the animations are terrible (in fights you don’t roll in the direction you’re holding, but in the direction that your character is currently facing, which feels clumsy since you can’t cancel a roll animation to quickly change directions), and running into water results in a black screen that instantly teleports you back to land. No drowning animation, nothing. My Time At Portia is clearly a PC game first and foremost, and the lack of polish really holds it back and keeps it feeling like it’s still an early access game. It’s not even close to being the worst game I’ve played on Game Pass, though, and I could see many having fun with it.

Having an okay-ish time with My Time At Portia first appeared on Killa Penguin