Satisfactory took way too much of my time so for a follow-up, I wanted something short and chill. This potion brewing game almost fit that bill except that it’s a tad too long as there is some grinding towards the end. It’s another crafting game but the crafting part is more than just selecting an option from a list. Here you brew potions by actually grinding ingredients and dropping them into the cauldron. The concept is clever and it uses familiar mechanics in a novel way to simulate the process of brewing a potion. It’s not a deep game but it’s not bad at all.

The story is that you’re a budding alchemist who fortuitously comes across the abandoned premises of a previous one and sets up shop there. You have a basic living space, an alchemy workspace and a basement with the remains of a more complex alchemical apparatus. Perhaps most importantly, the garden has an Enchanted Tree which causes plants grown there to magically flourish, making it a renewable source of ingredients. Every day, customers arrive with their requests and your job is to brew and sell them the potions they need. In doing so, you earn gold and build your own fame and reputation. Once in a while, merchants also arrive to offer their own goods and services. These include ingredients which you’ll never get enough of, seeds to grow new types of plants in your garden, equipment upgrades and renovation works to expand your shop. Over time, you’ll learn to brew ever more complex potions with exotic effects and naturally reach for the ultimate feat of alchemy of creating the Philosopher’s Stone.

At the core of the game is the unique mechanic by which potions are brewed. All of the effects that can be incorporated into a potion are represented as positions on a three-dimensional map. Every brewing position has you start at the exact center of the map which is initially obscured. Every ingredient represents a path along which your potion can move. So brewing one means choosing and adding ingredients to navigate across the map. As it moves, you uncover more of the map and can see where the effects are. To brew a simple potion, all that is needed is for the potion to touch the position on the map associated with the intended effect. However by overlapping the space perfectly, you can increase the potency of the potion. Furthermore there are obstacles on the map which block a direct route. The more exotic the effect, the farther away they are from the center and the more obstacles lie in way.

It may be confusing at first what the game wants you to do and the tutorial isn’t much help. But it’s not difficult to understand how it works and how the ingredients are organized. The challenge is that the paths each ingredient are neither straight nor simple. They twist, turn, sometimes loop around in weird shapes. You can control how far along the path you want to follow by carefully grinding the ingredient as needed. You can also always move the potion towards the center by carefully diluting it with water. This requires a certain amount of finesse to nudge the position of the potion to the spot needed to achieve maximum potency while avoiding the obstacles that will lead to a failed potion. The most difficult potions seem impossible to reach at first as they are so far away and completely surrounded by obstacles. But the game later offers additional tools and alternate routes to get at them. It’s a fair amount of interesting gameplay and not at all a bad way of conceptualizing how alchemy works.

The graphics are obviously not the best but they’re cute and thematic. I have more of an issue with the extreme repetitiveness of the music as it’s just one loop over and over again. Plus you’re only ever stuck in your shop. From what the visitors say, there’s obviously a town and a world outside, but you can’t ever go outside. When you need supplies and services, you need to wait for the appropriate vendor to stop by your shop. Perhaps worst of all is that you can’t ever use one of your potions. You can brew potions that cause explosions, induce hallucinations, revive the corpses into undead and grant superhuman strength. But you will only ever get to hear about their effects secondhand from the stories of your customers. Amusingly you can even sell customers potions improve their ability to haggle in business deals but you can’t ever use them yourself.

I do like the snippets of dialogue you get with the customers and merchants. Part of the fun is listening to their descriptions of the problems they’re having and figuring out which potion effects would fit their needs. The addition of the extra potion bases and hence extra maps is a great way of extending the gameplay space. It feels incredibly powerful once you have reliable access to the crystals which can teleport you past obstacles. And of course you can combine potion effects in all kinds of ways. Even with the full suite of tools and ingredients unlocked, the customers can always come up with infuriatingly difficult demands. They might insist on a specific ingredient to be included even though it takes the potion in the opposite direction that the intended effect. They might require that multiple effects be combined while stipulating that no more than a certain number of ingredients be used. In fact, I’m not certain that it’s possible to fulfill all of the requests.

This is obviously a game made by a very small team and I’d say it does exactly what it sets out to do. I’d actually prefer if it were a little shorter as the final objectives are just a somewhat boring grind. It would also have been more user friendly to include some extra tools later in the game to cut down on the tedium, for example some kind of magical grinding device so you don’t have to keep moving your mouse up and down to grind ingredients with your pestle and mortar. But it is a unique take in the genre of crafting games and succeeds in making you feel like you really are brewing potions, at least for a little while.