My Time at Portia

Six years after its full release, My Time at Portia's most-upvoted review isn't from a critic or a genre veteran making comparisons to Stardew Valley — it's from a 74-year-old player with more than 6,000 hours logged, who bought the game for their granddaughter and ended up just as hooked themselves. That's a genuinely remarkable thing for a crafting sim to have earned, and it's worth starting there before getting into the long list of technical complaints that runs alongside it.

A workshop, a town, and a lot to do

The pitch is a post-apocalyptic spin on the farming-sim template pioneered by games like Harvest Moon and popularised for a modern audience by Stardew Valley: you inherit your father's derelict workshop in the town of Portia and rebuild it by fulfilling commissions, gathering and mining resources, crafting furniture and tools, farming crops with planter boxes and irrigation systems, and building relationships — friendships, and eventually romance — with a genuinely lively cast of townsfolk who have their own daily routines. The Studio Ghibli-inspired art direction gives the whole thing a warmth that's distinct from its more pastoral influences, mixing mystery with cosiness in a way reviewers consistently single out as the game's most memorable quality.

More structured, and grindier, than the comparison suggests

Where Portia diverges most from Stardew Valley is structure. Rather than a loosely-paced sandbox where you set your own priorities, Portia layers in commissions, deadlines and competitive leaderboards against rival workshops, giving the loop a more directed, achievement-oriented rhythm. Several reviewers who came in expecting a straightforward Stardew clone specifically flag this as the biggest adjustment — the game rewards efficient, goal-driven play more than idle puttering, and some describe combat and certain content "zones" as feeling shallow or repetitive next to the depth of the crafting and relationship systems. That's a fair trade for players who want more direction in their life sim; it's a real disappointment for anyone hoping for exactly Stardew Valley with a new coat of paint.

The complaint that's followed the game for six years

The other constant, and the reason this review can't simply match the game's 91.5% approval rating with a higher score, is technical. A long, consistent thread running from the game's 2019 launch through recent reviews describes crashes, old bugs that persisted across years of patches, and a save system tied specifically to sleeping in bed — meaning a crash between rest points can cost real, sometimes substantial progress. One frequently echoed sentiment is that the developers have "a very bad habit of not fixing old bugs," and it's notable that this complaint shows up in reviews written years apart rather than clustering around the original launch, suggesting it's been a genuine, ongoing issue rather than a solved launch-week problem. A separate, specific complaint — Epic Online Services bundled into a game with no online or social features to justify it — drew one of the single most-upvoted negative reviews in the game's history, from players who saw no reason for a purely single-player game to need it at all.

Loved anyway, often with help from mods

None of this has stopped Portia from building the kind of devoted following most life sims never achieve. Reviewers across a striking range of ages describe hundreds or thousands of hours invested, and more than one specifically credits the community mod scene with smoothing over the base game's rough edges into something closer to what they feel it should have been at launch. Recent review sentiment tracks almost exactly with the lifetime score, suggesting this is a stable, settled reputation rather than one still shifting in either direction — a game whose flaws and its charms have both been known quantities for years.

Final verdict

My Time at Portia earns its devoted fanbase honestly: a distinctive setting, a genuinely large amount of crafting and relationship content, and real cross-generational appeal that few games in this genre can claim. It settles at 7 rather than higher because a real, persistent technical complaint — crashes, unresolved old bugs, and a save system that can cost you progress — has followed the game across its entire six-year lifespan rather than fading with time. Go in with patience for that reality, save deliberately, and there's a lot of very well-loved game waiting underneath it.

Price and review data checked 5 August 2026.

If you'd rather your progress persisted without needing to manage manual save points around a crash risk, Wanderer saves continuously in the background instead.