Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator (PC)
Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator is a mix of magic and the mundane. In your alchemical cauldron you brew potions with powerful enchantments, but you’re doing it made-to-order for a customer. Strange concoctions must be made to bring you closer to crafting the fabled Philosopher’s Stone, but you’ll definitely have to put in the elbow grease pounding plants and mushrooms in your mortar and pestle day in and day out. There is some inevitable tedium in Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator, but perhaps the strongest magic you’ll find will be how oddly compelling it remains despite the repetitive work involved.
Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator begins when you inherit an apothecary and begin your work as an alchemist. You have a special garden where you can collect herbs quickly at the start of a new day, you have a lab for developing special compounds or helpful salts, but most importantly, you have your cauldron and the storefront. Each day a handful of customers will drop by and request potions with certain properties, their requests usually only comprising of a single required enchantment but later on they will begin to pay more for ones with specific attributes like few ingredients or a specific potency. The gold you make from fulfilling these orders will in turn allow you to buy special ingredients from traveling merchants, an easily understood sequence of benefits arising in how the storefront is managed. With there being no actual way to lose, you can always rely on this part of the alchemist life to bring in new resources to help you recover from even the deepest of mistakes.
The cauldron will be where you do most of your work, because brewing potions in Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator is a complicated but compelling process. When it’s time to make a new concoction, you’ll find yourself looking a large map with hardly anything filled in. This map must be explored through experimentation, each item you add to your cauldron adding a travel path that your potion will undergo on the map. Different ingredients create differently shaped paths, their direction and curves traveled once you start spinning your spoon. Drop an ingredient in the mortar and pestle though and you can grind it up, making the specific path formed longer and possibly undertake new twists and turns. Across this map there are potion outlines you’ll want to have your marker enter, the first potion made in an outline revealing its enchantment for future uses. Lining up with the outline perfectly will increase the strength of the potion, and you can add more magic to the mix by continuing on with a brew to take it to other locations. The only real danger in this process will be areas on the map filled with bones, your potion at risk if you brush against them and outright lost if you don’t exit the bone-filled area before the brew is drained completely.
There are a lot of ideas at play in this map exploration that make it effective. Each ingredient having a set path that can be lengthened means each time you’re making something you need to look across your full spread of options and try to find the most efficient or effective items for inclusion. Your resources will limit your flexibility, the player sometimes needing to weigh options like if they want to use the last of a special herb, risk brushing against bones, or spend more of some other ingredient to get where they desire. The spoon mixing and mortar grinding will sometimes need to be done quite carefully, the difference between a powerful potion or a doomed brew sometimes coming down to choices made during what can otherwise feel like the moments of quick labor. Exploring the map is a process independent of fulfilling orders and it’s rather large and occasionally hard to navigate to get to certain potion types, and later on you even get a second map that rearranges available enchantments so you might prefer to make it on that map instead. Whirlpools exist on the maps as well, the player able to activate them to teleport their potion in progress to a new part of the map, a testing process added to your map exploration as you need to see if they’re helpful or hurtful. Even once you know the lay of the maps though, Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator remains exploratory because you can try to find more cost efficient routes or a specific patron might make a demand that requires you straying from your usual potion designs.
What keeps Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator from becoming obnoxiously tedious though is the recipe book. While you have to purchase additional pages to store more recipes, you are free to fill it in with the exact ingredients and movements made to concoct the different potion types. When next you need that potion, be it for a customer or for your alchemy lab, you need only open the recipe book, click it, and so long as you have the same resources available as last you made it, you can pull it out immediately without any work involved. While this will be key to making the storefront easier to run swiftly, there are other boons to be found. You can save a recipe for merely traveling around the map, meaning you can continue brewing from a spot and then decide your path from there based on the desired creation. The laboratory where you make complicated potions that mix together in your efforts to forge the alchemist’s dream of a Philosopher’s Stone will inevitably need to be made many times over, these often resource and labor intensive due to their more unusual designs, and yet if you save the recipe you can easily reproduce your lab work when it’s needed. The lab provides a long term goal, what little story there is being that you’re becoming a better alchemist by creating strange minerals and salts in it, although the salts at least can contribute over in potion making since they can do things like rotate potion paths or shorten them.
The recipe book won’t free you from the fact potion making will always be of a fairly similar shape to how it starts. Put ingredients in the pestle and cauldron to make paths, use the bellows to add enchantments, and then finalize it in a bottle for whatever purpose it has. There are some little ideas introduced like minerals that teleport you forward on the map so you can skip by bone clusters, water that pulls you back towards the map’s center for a free way to travel but only in a specific direction, and the second map has oil sections that throw off your movement line should you enter them, but this potion creating system could reasonably feel repetitive to some players. The medieval manuscript art design and lack of time pressures does give the game a sort of cozy ambience though, the player free to take their time and mess around with even customers content to wait in line as you fiddle around in your cauldron for hours if you so wish.
Perhaps the one area the game truly strains how much work it expects out of you though is some of the requirements in the Alchemist’s Path. Short term goals like brewing potions of a certain type or making things in the alchemy lab appear in a checklist, and once you’ve completed one set of them, you’ll move onto the next chapter in this path. Continuing down the path makes new resources available to you from merchants and increases how much you can sell things for. Price points can already be influenced by leveling up with experience acquired from replenishing markers on the potion-making map, and you can also haggle with every customer and merchant in a quick reactive minigame if you want to be frugal, but the Alchemist’s Path is key to eventually unlocking things like the second map so it can’t be ignored. Unfortunately, the later parts of this chapter system require you to raise your store’s popularity, and there’s no quick way to do so.
Customers in Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator will have little stories or justifications for why they’re buying from you, some benevolent, some clearly evil. One guy might just want a strength potion to help with fishing, but another will straight up tell you he wants to blow up his neighbor’s house, and there is a reputation system involved in which people you sell to and which ones you turn away. You can eventually ban people from your store depending on whether you want to be a good or evil alchemist, but while this will effect your clientele and what kind of potions they request, popularity is separate. Popularity increases by sales regardless of who you’re helping, even more so if you don’t haggle, but turning away customers leads to a deduction that can be damaging at times. If you can’t make a specific potion due to low resources or don’t want to service a ne’er-do-well, your popularity will take hits, and the final chapters of the Alchemist’s Path require incredibly high popularity that can only be earned through constant successful sales. There’s not much room to increase it beyond constant plain potion making, and while your recipe book can remove the toil of it, it still takes a long time to accrue popularity levels, making the game’s end goals feel much weaker. Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator doesn’t feel like a game where chasing an ending is intended, but setting a high bar encourages players to try and hit it and the game does not make that final hurdle enjoyable to clear.
THE VERDICT: Undeniably repetitive and yet spell-bindingly engrossing, Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator’s potion mixing is simple to explain but enriched through the intricacies of the many systems it integrates. Exploring the map, pondering the best route to make with your available ingredients, balancing your storefront with your experimentation, these extra layers make it easy to get sucked into the work routine. The recipe book is key to keeping the game away from being a slog, only the popularity accrual near the game’s end really a grind since otherwise it feels like you can always be working towards new discoveries and more intricate tasks.
And so, I give Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator for PC…
A GOOD rating. A lot of jobs can technically be repetitive but still fulfilling, and Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator manages to adapt that feeling to the creation of magical potions quite well. The recipe book is a good stand-in for how certain parts of a craft become second nature with time, the player not needing to retread the early days of discovery and training so long as they make a note of the actions taken. Picky patrons and new goals in areas like the lab or Alchemist’s Path still encourage you to return to the cauldron and map often enough that the store won’t end up being run automatically, and resource management remains a constant key element as affording ingredients and knowing which ones to use in designing a path to a potion type keep influencing your decisions throughout. Popularity being so important to the game’s final goals feels a bit at odds with the game’s design, but most of the time the systems are able to add complexity without confusion, rolled out effectively so you’re not worrying about things like potion rotation until you’ve had time to get your bearings with simpler stuff like diluting potions with water. Elements like haggling are quick but very effective if done right, and even then they have difficulty levels and aren’t necessary so you can stick to the more meditative work of potion making if you’d rather not feel any sort of time pressure. Promised updates do speak of adding more involved growth like upgraded equipment or new talents and Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator does feel like it can have more systems integrated because the fundamental potion making follows some core rules that prevent it from becoming bloated. That clean core does mean a good deal of time will be spent mixing the brew and grinding plants, but each action always at least comes with purpose since every inch that spoon moves or each bit of ingredient ground does impact your ability to make the potions you desire.
Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator isn’t the kind of game you go to for excitement. It’s a recursive test of logic and planning, constant little decisions adding up as you become more capable, quicker, and richer so you can work on the more involved mixtures after. Some players might be repulsed by this gameplay loop as soon as they realize its shape remains consistent, and yet each part of it has the kind of intricacies that make completing work so satisfying. Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator is the kind of experience that can pull you in for hours with you unaware so much time had passed, it rather easy to get in a flow state where you’re constantly making progress on streamlining your work that makes it easy to quickly leap right into your next desired task. More systems and variation could potentially shake away some of the undeniable repetition, but for a game claiming to simulate the life of a magical potion brewer, it does well to mix the realities of running a business with the entertaining sense of discovery found in dabbling in the arcane.