Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator

Insanely addictive with fantastic progression, huge improvement from it's EA days.

Really a great, simple but not easy game.

Start your own potion shop and become the town alchemist for the local villagers and adventurers... or for the local bandits and evil wizards, if you prefer. It's a simple but fun premise, and it's easy to toil over your cauldron for hours experimenting with herbs, mushrooms and gemstones, discovering new recipes and gradually building your skills. The main brewing mechanic is using different ingredients to move your potion icon around a map in different patterns- crushing the ingredients with the mortar and pestle will extend the path each ingredient provides, stirring will advance you along the path, pouring more liquid into the mixture will pull you back towards the center, path and all, and adding special alchemical salts will do things like erase part of the path or rotate it. Every new ingredient you purchase will open up a new pattern to use, and if you're lucky you can even buy seeds to start growing your own supply of new plants in your garden. It's a very satisfying and enjoyable progression, and you'll get a few repeat customers you can chat with that add to the cozy feel and make it feel like you're really establishing yourself as an important part of the community. You can also decorate your shop, customize the look of your potions and rearrange and expand your garden, giving you plenty to do when you're not busy brewing. Sadly, you can't visit the town brothel, despite repeated invitations. My only complaint would be that once you've thoroughly explored the maps and bought most of what there is to buy, creating the complex potions required to finish the game becomes a little tedious. There's not a real ending, but once you've made the most difficult salts and finished the little checklist the game gives you, it can pretty much be considered won. Still, if the best complaint I can muster is that the game finally runs out of things to discover and the fun has to end, that should tell you something about how pleasurable the journey to get there is.

Love the crafting system, love the challenge. Quite fun in the beginning. Once you have you garden production set up and the first map explored it gets quite repetitive. Exploring the second map felt kinda boring, the third - felt like a chore. The endgame feel quite disappointing. The goals feel artificial and forced. At some point you start having too much money - there is nothing to spend it on. Also last stones and salts feel kinda useless. Overall love this game and would be really glad to see some updates to the endgame. Expanding the garden, selling potions in bulk, scaling up - would love to see that.

Great alchemy simulator. The art and music are pleasant. The game makes you think a bit, but not too much. There is some exploration, some economics, some repetitive actions too like gardening stuff (but at least these are aesthethically pleasant). Haggling minigame is nicely balanced. A great game in my opinion.