Now with the endless wave of Battle Royal games coming out at the moment, I was quite happy to play something a little more wholesome and less murdery. So here is My Time in Porta, a sweet little game that oozes charm and structure gameplay. But with all the games that centre on crafting/building and exploration, what will make My Time in Porta any more special than the rest?

Let’s find out.



Players take on the role of a novice builder who dreams of restoring their family name and becoming master builder of the island community of Porta. As you could imagine, things don’t start off so well as the community is full of many people who doubt your skill and capability to earn the top spot of master builder, but everything around you seems to fall apart. Literally fall apart. So, it’s up to you to build bridges (both literally and metaphorically) with the town’s people, build wholesome relationships with local traders for support and guidance and of course, building in general.

There’s a lot of building to do if you’ve not guessed it.

As your time in Porta begins, players will start off by completing odd jobs, restoring the family home and developing an effective and powerful work station, allowing you to expand your services and improve your skills. Once you complete a number of tasks, soon enough you’ll be pushed into engaging with the towns people, taking on daily/weekly jobs and exploring the beautiful island of Porta.
Things do start off a little slow as you build bonds with people and slowly gather enough resources to improve your home/work station. The first couple of hours are a tat grindy and require a little patience as you repeat multiple tasks such as mining particular caves, logging and building the same things over and over until you rank up.

But once you get past that introduction stage, the game’s pacing does increase and soon enough you’ll be managing a decent workstation, while improving it with newly discovered resources. The game requires players to go out, explore and communicate with the town’s people when you can. You’ll need to sleep, eat and do your business as everything else goes on.



There are some neat mechanics in the game that allow you to communicate with other people in a number of inventive ways, build relationship which will benefit you in the long run of the game and of course let of some steam with some healthy competition via a rock, paper scissor style game. You can buy, sell anything you’ve acquired through exploration or made and take on personal side quests to help improve your status in the town.

Building is simple yet the range of different objects in the world you can make it pretty staggering and there’s always new objects being learnt as the game progresses.

To break things up there is some combat, more so prominent later in the game. Many of these encounters are pretty inventive with creative enemy designs and how the game allows players to craft their own gear with many different attributes to customise. Boss battles were the weakest aspect as they just require plenty of thrashing and nothing more, but were entertaining enough to see past the fault with their designs.



My Time in Porta is a charming and wonderful little game that’s easy to dive into, learn and master its complexities. Building is rewarding and exploration means a great deal as it influences progression in such an immense way. Its fun for everyone that loves building, crafting and following a simple story with a meaningful outcome and message at the end.

++ Engaging and thoughtful gameplay
+ Great sense of progression
+ Wonderful visuals and sense of exploration
- First few hours are a grind
- Sub-par bosses

A PC review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review

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