potionomics-overview
Must know

What’s it? A shopkeeping simulator. Additionally a life sim, courting sim, and deckbuilding card game, unexpectedly.
Anticipate to pay TBA
Launch date October 17, 2022
Developer Voracious Video games
Writer XSEED Video games
Reviewed on Intel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, GeForce RTX 2060
Multiplayer? No
Hyperlink Official site

There’s clearly one thing within the water—eye of newt, most likely. Potionomics is the newest game to have you ever flinging leaf and sinew right into a cauldron, although I dare say it could be a compelling game with out that. It is a game of a number of genres, however at its coronary heart it is a shopkeeping sim, where you handle a potion retailer in a comfy fantasy setting. You get the components, brew the inventory, and haggle with prospects. Then you definately go to mattress and do it once more, day after day.

All with the purpose, not of amassing a fortune, however of paying off a ridiculous debt, which is foisted on you the second you inherit your uncle’s store. It is greater than you can make ordinarily, which is why it is extraordinarily useful there is a potion competitors developing, and with a grand prize that might doubtlessly wipe your slate clear.

(Picture credit score: XSEED Video games)

The competitors imposes a rigorous construction, and a ticking clock to your turn-based store administration, with brew-offs towards your rival occurring each ten in-game days. Selecting your choices from a menu (every part is menu-based in Potionomics), your days are damaged up into discrete blocks of time. Will you open the store very first thing within the morning, spending two time items to flog your wares and earn some much-needed money? However maybe you need to set some potions brewing in your cauldrons first. Potions take time to brew, so when you wait you can come out to purchase components, flirt with the seller NPCs, or activity a hero with raiding the wilderness for uncommon provides. Earlier than you realize it the day is over, and you have forgotten to really open up the store.

It is simple to spend time outdoors your retailer, as the opposite distributors are memorable characters, introduced vividly to life with expressively animated speaking heads and humorous, if comfortably tropey dialogue. You may date them, and right here it feels lots like a Persona game, as you allocate blocks of time to constructing bonds, finally unlocking playing cards for the deckbuilding minigame. It is not essentially a criticism, however you need to know there isn’t any voice appearing. Maybe I simply anticipated it due to the high-quality 3D animation, however generally it felt like I used to be enjoying the game on mute.

You may’t spend all of your time flirting, nevertheless—there is a competitors to be received. It’s essential submit three high-powered potions at each stage of the competition, and you will have to do a lot of planning to have the ability to brew them. Higher potions want higher components, which you’ll both purchase randomly from heroes or purchase outright from the pinnacle of the heroes’ guild, though there are particular execs and cons to every. Heroic quests take time, gold and potions to yield worthwhile outcomes, whereas investing within the guild dangers disrupting the ecology of the monstrous wildernesses round you.

(Picture credit score: XSEED Video games)

Components in hand, you then should chuck them right into a cauldron, and right here this turns right into a game of fastidiously managing numbers. You will barely have a look at components by identify, however by their magimin make-up—magimins being the magical essences which have infused each plant and creature on the island. To make a health potion, for instance, you want a roughly equal variety of purple and green magimins. The simplest, and least expensive, strategy to obtain this is able to be to hurl a Feyberry (containing six purple magimins) and a Mandrake Root (six green magimins) into your effervescent pot.

Potionomics feels extraordinarily cohesive, with each ingredient interacting with each different.

These Minor Potions will solely get you to date, nevertheless. To make more cash from prospects—and stand a hope of successful the competitors—it’s good to utilise these rarer components. So that you advance to the following tier of health potions, by combining a Fairy Flower Bud, two Desert Metals and a Golemite. Now you have got some Widespread Health Potions: extra helpful to heroes and with the next market worth.

Issues rapidly get complicated once you start to brew potions requiring three or extra completely different magimins, as it may be tough to get the numbers in the appropriate proportions. There may be some leeway, however solely a bit of bit. I spent numerous time within the brewing menu, chucking in and eradicating components, and in the end discovered it exhausting.

(Picture credit score: XSEED Video games)

I discovered solace within the haggling minigame—or maybe ‘minigame’ is underselling it, as haggling might simply be a separate game. Right here Potionomics turns into Slay the Spire, as you ‘battle’ prospects with playing cards, so they are going to (hopefully) pay over the asking worth to your merchandise.

It is a distinctive spin on the system, with completely different goals aside from to win the battle—a sale is just about assured, you simply need to fleece the shopper as completely as doable. As an alternative of spending power to play playing cards, you are exhausting the shopper’s endurance stage, which ticks down with each card performed, and switch ended. It is doable to safe a worthwhile victory in a single flip, in case you’re dealt a great hand of playing cards—one thing that isn’t, fully, right down to luck.

In contrast to numerous deckbuilding video games, you’ll be able to freely add or take away playing cards out of your deck forward of battle, utilizing playing cards earned by interacting with the pleasant distributors. I loved managing the deck, because the variety of playing cards will not be overwhelming, they usually’re helpfully categorised round every of the foremost NPCs.

(Picture credit score: XSEED Video games)

These haggle-battles are, by far, essentially the most pleasant ingredient of Potionomics, being mild, brisk, but full of allure and simplistic techniques. This latter ingredient is expanded for the competitors haggle-battles, that are basically three-way boss battles between you, your rival, and the decide. Right here, all of your work—all of your potion-brewing and haggling and bonding and stock administration—pays off in a wonderful face-off that both validates, or punishes, your efforts main as much as the competitors.

Regardless of being comprised of seemingly disparate components, Potionomics feels extraordinarily cohesive, with each ingredient interacting with each different, and contributing to your higher purpose of successful the competitors. You would possibly play richer life sims, or courting sims, or deckbuilders or store administration video games, however you will not discover one other game that so adroitly smushes all of these genres collectively.