Potion Craft is an alchemy simulation game that sets you off as an novice Alchemist opening up shop in a town that’s left void of an Alchemist.
The town’s folks will come to you with their requests for potions and you would have to decipher what type of potions they need based on their plight.
The game is split up into “rooms” in your shophouse. There’s the shop where you would do your selling to customers, there’s your laboratory where you would make your potions, enchanted garden where your ingredients are grown and the basement where your alchemy machine is at.
What might capture the player’s attention is the art style and animation that simply oozes with it’s own unique-ness.
Visually it has its own style, from the static sprites to the animations. Pick up an ingredient and you’ll see some leaves falling off. When you pound the ingredients down with the pestle where it changes form from leaves and turn into a broken down mush. The way the potion boils in the cauldron with bubbles spewing out, something about those little details that make it visually appealing, akin to Banner Saga’s animations during the dialogue scenes.
Before you can start brewing you would have to visit the Enchanted Garden for ingredients in order to make your potions. Ingredients spawn at the start of the day and seem to be random on what spawns. Shifting over to the laboratory, you add ingredients into the cauldron or pestle and mortar to mix, there is a recipe map in the background that acts as a preview to how far you’ll get with that ingredient in order to reach its “destination” potion that can be discovered on the same map itself.
You can either add the ingredients straight into the cauldron or pound the ingredients down (this can double its “distance” on the map) to your desired range in order to avoid traps that would make the potion fail or in order to land directly on the potion “destination” to get a stronger mix. The flexibility of potion making is what I appreciate. You can use different concoctions in order to reach the same destination.
Once the potion has been made you can save the recipe so you can simply make the potion without going through the same process which can get tedious with long playthroughs. The shop floor is where customers buy the potions. You can either sell it straight to them or haggle with them through a minigame that can result in you making a more tidy profit.
From the foundations that are in place, I’m enjoying what niceplay games have made so far. It can either be a Zen potion crafting simulator or one where you try to milk the customers as much as possible in order to bring up that gold count. This is one to look out for if you’re into this genre.
Hailing from a small Island. Huge football fan. Drinks too much tea.
Survival, Roguelikes, Turn-based or Indie games in general are my go to genres but I like to dabble in all kinds of genres. I tend to have a soft spot for Shmups and Hidden Object Games once in a while.
Comment here