Potion Craft [Review]
Potion Craft is a crafting game without traditional exploration.
Image credit: tinyBuild / niceplay
Originally released by developer Niceplay Games and publisher tinyBuild in early access in 2021 and then on PC and Xbox in late 2022, medieval potion shop management simulator Potion Craft is now available on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation (PS4 and PS5) platforms. I played it on PlayStation 5.
In Potion Craft, the player is an alchemist who moves into an abandoned potion shop in a new town in fantasy medieval times. The player discovers potion recipes, repairs broken alchemical equipment, and builds up their clientele by fulfilling their requests as the shop gains renown.
Image credit: tinyBuild / niceplay
The core loop of Potion Craft follows a day cycle across five main screens. Every day, a random assortment of ingredients grows in your garden. You use the ingredients in the central screen to brew the potions. Customers and vendors arrive in a third screen, to the left of the center, which you must attend or dismiss. Once all the customers are gone, the day is over; you can either keep brewing to experiment, go into the screen below the center to work with the alchemical machine, or go up from center to your bedroom to end the day to repeat the cycle.
You’ll spend most of your time in the central screen, brewing potions. The approach to crafting them is interesting in that it’s very freeform. You’ve got a map in the center, which you must explore using your ingredients: each type of ingredient you grind up and add to the pot charts a path on the map by drawing differently shaped lines on the map, continuing on from the endpoint of the last ingredient you’ve added. Stirring the pot moves your marker along the line, and when it lines up with an “effect” marker on the map you pump the bellows to heat up the pot and add the effect to your potion. You can get the same results with wildly different recipes, so game becomes about charting the most efficient course to eliminate ingredient waste as you travel around the map to find the effects you need.
Image credit: tinyBuild / niceplay
One of the coolest things about this process is that it’s very tactile. You’ve got fine control over the pestle as you crush ingredients in the mortar, or over the spoon you use to stir the pot. Likewise the liquid base you can tilt to poor in, or the bellows you pump to produce heat have finely tuned controls. Each of these actions is accompanied by excellent sound design and detailed animation, which when paired with the precise thumbstick controls make it all feel satisfyingly physical and hands-on, like you’re actually manipulating the objects. The precision is important, because it changes plotting, travel, and positioning on the map in a fine-grained way. At first it was irritating to have to repeat these actions, but once I realized how much control they gave me over the process, I nearly stopped using the recipe book feature altogether, unless I was brewing very basic potions for a customer.
Image credit: tinyBuild / niceplay
The shop portion of the game serves as a way to suggest to the player how to explore the map, as clients make specific requests that mean you’ve got to discover new effects. Selling potions gives you money, which you can spend on rare ingredients or alchemy lab parts. Buying ingredients speeds things along because the garden’s yield is quite small. There’s an element of roleplay in selling the potions. Depending on who you choose to serve, your alignment (good vs evil) meter will fluctuate, changing the type of clientele that arrives. Some of the repeating clients, such as a guy who’s obviously a Witcher, create little mini-narratives as they make their orders and chat when they return to you.
While other games have taken on this style since Potion Craft’s original early access release, the game’s graphics are still unique and very charming. The game is presented as an animated medieval manuscript, drawn in ink and painted colors. Seeing this in high resolution on a TV makes it feel like an ancient storybook come to life.
Image credit: tinyBuild / niceplay
My biggest issue with the game is that the core gameplay is a bit simple and can get dull and repetitive. The controls and graphics go a long way to help alleviate that fatigue, but ultimately it does set in. Perhaps the game would have been more interesting if I was allowed to leave the shop and explore the world a little bit.
If you enjoy crafting games that are fully about the crafting and not about exploration, I’d suggest giving Potion Craft a try.
Potion Craft is now available on Switch and PS4/PS5. You can also find it on Xbox One/Series X|S and PC (Steam, GOG, and EGS).
