Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator Review

With all the simulator games coming out these days we were surely bound to get Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator at some point! Developed by Niceplay Games, Potion Craft puts you in the shoes of an aspiring alchemist who takes over a run down shop in a medieval town. Your goal is to discover magical recipes and become a well-known citizen, all while earning coins to upgrade your operation. Starting from only knowing how to create a mere healing potion, you’ll need to experiment and literally traverse the map of alchemic knowledge to gradually raise your skills and become the ultimate arcane brewmaster.

Potion Craft introduces a clever mechanic for discovering new recipes, which composes the bulk of its gameplay. Essentially, your goal is to move an empty bottle around a map that’s filled with hazards, twists, and turns. Different ingredients will move your bottle a certain predetermined distance and direction, and you’ll need to stack multiple items to reach your desired destination. There are books scattered all around, which grant experience points when you travel over them, and potion icons, which are where you need to ultimately end up to craft a new potion. If that’s not challenging enough, a fog engulfs the map, so you’ll need to explore a bit randomly to increase vision and find new types of concoctions. All of this is to say that Potion Craft offers strategic gameplay with a nifty puzzle element in figuring out what ingredients to utilise.

To roam the map, you need to brew potions by crushing, stirring, and heating ingredients. This simply involves dragging your cursor around to mash things up like in Cooking Mama, but it’s a satisfying process and makes you feel like you’re not just controlling an avatar but actually brewing something. The medieval art style and music also do a great job of getting you in the mood for some crafting. Everything has a hand-drawn manuscript look with crisp animations. Successfully brewed potions can be saved into a recipe book, which allows you to instantly create that potion in the future with one click, provided you have the necessary ingredients in hand. A limited amount of pages in the book prevents players from getting too comfortable with saving every potion they come across though, and adds another layer of strategy in deciding how valuable a recipe is to them.

Ingredients are randomly grown in your garden each day or can be purchased from a merchant for a hefty price. I found the garden typically will only give you “common” ingredients that move you a short distance in a standard direction (left, right, up, down), while merchants will sell items that are more beneficial as you branch out into treacherous areas. I think there was a missed opportunity with the garden to allow players to choose what to grow instead of having it be completely random. This doesn’t have to be a super complex mechanic, but being able to grow plants from seed to harvest would be more engaging. Either way, getting freebies in your garden each morning is nice.

There’s definitely a lot of guesswork in Potion Craft, since you won’t know for certain where to explore or what ingredients to stock up on. As a general rule, I made sure I had enough items to at least give me flexibility in movement. The last thing you want is to burn 20 ingredients to get somewhere and end up in a situation when the potion you want is a few pixels to the south, but you don’t have any more ingredients that move you downward. You’ll also need to sell potions to patrons of your shop, who will ask for specific types and strengths. I definitely had trouble fulfilling some of the orders, since I simply didn’t have the recipes unlocked or ingredients on hand. Fortunately, the penalty for declining a request is pretty minimal. This backs up the idea that Potion Craft is meant to be a pretty casual game — villagers aren’t going to be kicking your door down to get their potion of agility and you can freely progress at your own pace.

The game’s progression system consists of a basic skill tree with four different linear paths and a long list of missions that award experience. These objectives are great since they keep you on track and prevent the game from becoming too much of a sandbox-style affair. You can also advance your haggling skill, which involves a short minigame that awards bonus coins when selling to customers. I found it important to invest in money-making skills early on, since you’ll want to have enough funds in your pocket when the premium merchants randomly roll through your shop.

Potion Craft successfully combines a bunch of seemingly random gameplay elements in a way that provides a varied, yet manageable experience. Anyone who’s dreamt of becoming an alchemist will obviously love this title, but it’s not only limited to those folks. Some trial and error is required, but the penalties for making a mistake aren’t intimidating. There’s enough content in the full game to keep you busy expanding your potion shop for hours on end, and I definitely enjoyed the innovative gameplay — a refreshing change of pace from your standard “simulator” affair.