Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator is a potion-brewing and shop-keeping title currently available in early access for the PC on Steam. The game, developed by niceplay games and published by tinyBuild, abandons the hyper-realistic 3D graphics of many simulator games for hand-drawn 2D illustrations inspired by medieval folklore. While currently limited by the early access release, the content available is engaging, easy to learn, and rewarding for fans of relaxing, simulation titles.
Getting started in Potion Craft, players will set up shop in an abandoned house. The shop contains a brewing room, run-down basement, outdoor garden, upstairs bedroom, and shopfront. Players can navigate to each room using the WASD or directional keys, making for quick jumps between needed areas. To progress in Potion Craft, players must gather ingredients to craft potions for the shop's customers, boosting shop levels and popularity while making the money needed to purchase rare brewing ingredients.
To brew potions, players will have access to four main tools. The Cauldron is used to combine and mix ingredients, the Bellows stokes the fire under the cauldron, the Mortar and Pestle are used to grind ingredients, and then Water is used to adjust potions. Players can choose to use raw ingredients to brew their potions or grind each item to lower the number needed for each brew. Behind the brewing stand, a large map is always visible, and as players experiment and unlock new Potion Craft recipes, it fills out to show each recipe that has been learned.
The shop interface is very simple compared to games like Moonlighter, showing only the customers and the scale used to sell potions. Players will interact with each customer in line and must guess which potion is needed for the problem presented. Three wrong guesses will end the interaction, and deduct reputation points needed to level the shop's popularity. This can be especially difficult in the beginning, when customers can ask for potions the player either hasn't unlocked or doesn't have the ingredients stocked to craft. If the correct potion is selected, there will be the opportunity to haggle prices using a short minigame. Players will need to hit certain icons on a sliding bar to increase the worth of their potion, and then shake hands before the worth devalues. Of all the mechanics in Potion Craft, the haggling system is the area that is the least intuitive. A patch to slow how quickly a successful icon press devalues would help make the mechanic more rewarding for players.
There are several ways to obtain the items needed for brewing potions in Potion Craft. Ingredients can be purchased from traveling merchants, synthesized using the alchemy set in the basement, and picked from the garden to the right of the brewing room. Every day a new random selection of herbs, mushrooms, and flowers can be harvested from the garden, helping to keep the brewing cabinet stocked. However, the early access gameplay doesn't include a farming element to ensure needed ingredients are available each day, or offer expansions to the current garden size to increase the daily yield. While garden expansions are on the full-release roadmap for the game, it currently limits gameplay, and players may need to wait several in-game days to amass needed items for the more difficult potions.
While Potion Craft's simplicity could be a welcome change from the more complex kitchen or farm management simulation games, it may also be too rote for those who enjoy larger maps of interactable areas. Because of this, adding storybook-style areas of exploration similar to the garden area could be a good solution. Players could forage these areas daily, with the chance for rare items to spawn, or they could encounter different merchants outside the shop for a chance to purchase certain items at a better price. Despite this, Potion Craft offers engaging, rewarding gameplay and will likely appeal to fans of crafting and shop-management sims, while offering a unique, whimsical addition to the simulation genre.
Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator is available now in early access on PC via Steam. A Steam game code was provided to Screen Rant for the purpose of this preview.