As the former MythBuster Adam Savage once said, “The only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.” 2022’s Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator, is a simulator title in which players are encouraged to screw around and (sometimes) write down their findings to create potions that can both help everyone who visits your potion shop and provide you, the local alchemist, with a steady source of income. Allow me to refine my thoughts on Potion Craft into an easily digestible liquid solution to help you decide if you should give it a look.

The plot of Potion Craft is rather straightforward: You’ve found an abandoned house on the edge of town that contains alchemy equipment and an enchanted garden used to grow potion ingredients. This house was supposedly once inhabited by a wizard but appears to have been left vacant and untouched for some time. So, you decide to move into the house and use its equipment and garden to brew and sell potions for the townsfolk. Possibly while hoping the wizard doesn’t suddenly return to town to discover that you’ve done so.

You start with a small handful of ingredients from your enchanted garden and a huge, sprawling map of all the alchemical concoctions you can eventually learn to brew. You realize that you know next to nothing about what sorts of secrets that map has to tell you. However, that’s exactly when Potion Craft’s tutorial steps in to show you the basics and set you on your way. Among the first things you’ll learn are how to combine two specific ingredients to create a weak healing potion and, more broadly, the general procedure for successfully brewing any potion.

That brings me to the majority of Potion Craft’s core gameplay loop, which also happens to be one of my favorite aspects of Alchemist Simulator. The only way to learn how to brew different potions is to experiment with ingredients and see what happens. Your Alchemy Map will help you do this by giving you a means to visualize each potion you create as a traveler on a journey. Your potion’s ultimate destination is at least one of the effects you’ve learned on the Alchemy Map, such as restoring health or mana, for example.

Each ingredient you add to any potion will cause your “traveling” concoction to take different paths along the Alchemy Map until it eventually arrives at an alchemical effect, whether you already know said effect or not. Suppose you guide your potion onto a spot on the map which represents an effect you don’t yet know. In that case, you can heat the potion via the bellows beneath your cauldron to cause a chemical reaction and permanently discover that effect. In this way, your Alchemy Map will tell you what kind of potion you’ll end up with as you add ingredients.

Say you want to brew a healing potion and you know where the “healing” effect icon is on your Alchemy Map. You can mouse over each alchemy ingredient you have in stock and, as you do, the Alchemy Map will show you how adding that ingredient will cause your potion’s path to change, whether it be toward or away from the direction of your desired effect. You’ll need to use that information to guide your potion to the “healing” effect icon by adding enough of each appropriate ingredient. It’s much easier to get the hang of than I’m making it sound, I promise.

However, you don’t always want to have your current potion take the shortest, most direct path toward whichever combination of effects you want the final product to have. You’ll notice icons on the Alchemy Map that look like books. The more of these icons you collect by touching them with your potion icon on the map, the more experience points you’ll gain. Once you’ve gained a certain amount of experience points, you’ll level up and earn a skill point that you can spend on upgrades in one of four helpful skill trees.

These experience books appear virtually all over the Alchemy Map. You can collect lots of these books more efficiently by guiding each potion you brew along paths that vary in length and veer off in many directions. Even if you don’t brew a successful potion every time, you’ll keep all the experience books you collect during each brewing attempt. Since you always have an incentive to collect as much experience as you can, this is how Potion Craft encourages you to experiment with different combinations of various ingredients – or, as I prefer to phrase that, “screw around and see what happens.”

I’ve been repeatedly surprised by how much fun I’ve had doing nothing but haphazardly experimenting with all the different kinds of reagents I have at my disposal within Potion Craft. I’ve lost myself for hours in that gameplay mechanic alone. That’s something I haven’t been able to say about very many games I’ve reviewed for a long while now, and I commend Potion Craft for being such a pleasant change of pace in that way. Even if I screw up and my potion attempt fails, I almost always want to keep trying new recipes just for the sheer fun I find in doing so.

You’ll notice my mentioning that it’s possible to make a mistake that causes a potion you’re working on to fail. As you explore the Alchemy Map, you’ll notice portions of it that are filled with what looks to me like bones. If your potion icon stays in one of these zones for too long as you add ingredients to change the potion’s path, you’ll see your potion vial icon start to drain. If you don’t find a way to leave these “no-go zones” quickly, your potion bottle will drain completely, your brewing attempt will fail, and you’ll have to start all over.

I originally didn’t like how large and frequent these “unsafe zones” appeared on the Alchemy Map. Still, I’ve developed a new appreciation for them because they present obstacles that you’ll likely only get past if you start thinking creatively as you experiment with each potion you brew. I’ve thought several times now, “I can’t reach the potion effect I want because a hazard zone is in the way, but I bet I can add specific ingredients to get around that.” These obstacles help take a lot of potential monotony out of the potion brewing process for me.

I think that covers the “screwing around” portion of the quote I used earlier, which brings me to the “writing it down” bit. Within Potion Craft, you have a recipe book in which you can store a finite number of potion recipes to quickly brew and sell them to your customers. Your recipe book can initially store a maximum of 10 recipes, yet you can significantly expand that number by buying sheets of enchanted paper from certain merchants who will periodically visit your shop. You can also edit and delete recipes you’ve stored whenever you’d like.

If a customer requests a potion you’ll have to brew from scratch because you don’t have it saved in your recipe book, you’ll never need to worry about brewing that customer’s order quickly. Customers are willing to wait as long as it takes for you to make the potion they want; no one will walk out of your shop in a huff because you made your alchemical magic too long. That’s another aspect of Potion Craft that I love, especially since I explained earlier that I can easily lose track of time while I’m working on new recipes.

You might also want to be mindful of the sorts of customers to whom you sell your potions. Based on your regular clients, your potion shop can have a positive, negative, or neutral reputation in the eyes of the townsfolk. If you sell healing potions to brave adventurers and town guards as they keep the peace, that will positively affect your shop’s reputation. Selling potions that help evildoers like assassins, arsonists, and thieves, will turn your shop’s perception negative. A neutral reputation will attract customers from all walks of life.

The deeper your shop’s reputation is in either the negative or positive direction influences what sorts of people will want to buy your potions. If the word around town is that you’re willing to supply hoodlums and necromancers with the potions they’ll need for their unsavory agendas, then more of those kinds of people will want to buy from you. As you might imagine, the inverse is true if you don’t sell to those types of patrons. The reputation system lets you decide what kind of potion shop you want to run, which I think is a great way Potion Craft offers players more autonomy.

I also think it’s fairly amusing that even if you go out of your way to keep your potion shop’s reputation as positive as you possibly can, you might still occasionally find yourself so strapped for funds that you can’t afford to be overly picky in terms of who you allow to buy your potions. I like to imagine myself saying things like, “I know you’re an assassin and I despise those who do what you do, but I’ll sell you this poison anyway because I’m flat broke right now. Count yourself lucky, you fiend.”

Of course, as someone who both sells potions and makes purchases from merchants, you should learn how to effectively haggle with people. That’s the final main aspect of Potion Craft I want to mention. Potion Craft features a haggling mini-game that lets you try to get a better price from customers and merchants alike. You can pick from a selection of topics to haggle about with anyone who visits your shop; which of these topics you pick dictates how difficult the haggling mini-game will be.

Haggle effectively and you’ll save yourself quite a bit of money during each transaction you make. Keep in mind that haggling can easily and severely backfire on you. What’s more, if you haggle with a merchant (successfully or otherwise) and then decide you want to buy more or fewer items from them after you’ve haggled, that will irritate the merchant and cause them to make you pay extra for everything. Learning when you can benefit from haggling is just as important as learning how to haggle well.

There are many reasons I’m quite comfortable recommending Potion Craft to pretty much anyone who might have so much as a passing interest in it. The fact that you have no time limits or customer patience meters to deal with makes me consider Potion Craft as a “podcast game.” If you enjoy more relaxed games of this nature as much as I do, you really should have a look at Alchemist Simulator.

A PC review key for Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator was provided by tinyBuild for this review.

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Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator

$19.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Experimenting with potion recipes can be very relaxing.
• No time limits or impatient customers to deal with.
• Players are encouraged to explore just how much they can do with potion ingredients.

Cons

• Certain aspects of the core gameplay loop can be confusing at first.