Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator

7/10 While I realize I'm a bit late to the party, Potion Craft has some of the most unique gameplay I've ever had the joy of getting to experience. At least at the start that's true. The first few hours of the game, it was fresh, fun, and had a really great element of just being relaxing. But near the middle to end game, it gets extremely grindy and a bit boring to the point I almost wanted to stop. Potion Craft really allows the player to dive into the role of an alchemist while still keeping things cozy and fun. The mechanics are simple and relatively easy to understand. Via mixing ingredients together that you farm from your garden, you travel around around a map, collecting experience as you go along and mixing together potions. Every ingredient moves the vial in a different direction and patter, with some of the more valuable ones leading to more unique patterns and in some cases unique effects such as teleportation. Those potions are then sold to citizens who come into your shop with specific requests. It's half Sort the Court and half Cooking Mama. Meanwhile, some customers will also sell you unique rare ingredients and upgrades, progressing the game's "story" further along, with the primary goal of completing all 10 chapters worth of quests and creating the philosopher's stone. The main issue comes from the latter portion of the game. While I expected things to get somewhat more difficult, and they do, it becomes grindier than anything else, potions become less of an interesting puzzle on how to reach on the map and more of a frustration as you'll find yourself get close to unlocking one only to run out of ingredients or find out that you don't have an upgrade that allows you to perfect it into a max 3 potion, the most ideal of them, and waste your time doing so. Some of this is alleviated by the recipe page, allowing you to store a number of potion recipes, with a limit, so you can recreate them without having to redo the whole path. Admittedly it was even fun at times, learning how to "max out" the efficiency of these recipes. But ultimately, by the end game I was enjoying my time exploring the maps less and less and just wanting to get it over with as progression slowed to a halt. I was able to complete the first 5 chapters in about 4 hours and it took me another 9 for the second half. Despite this, I did genuinely have a good time with the game. The main gameplay of running a potion bottle around a map was super unique and one I had never and likely will never see done before in a game that's so simplistic yet so entertaining. While solving the villagers issues at times left me stumped and stuck, figuring out the potion they were looking for and instantly creating it in my recipe book filled me with immense satisfaction. If it wasn't for the slog that the game turned into during the second half, my score would likely be much higher but as it stands, it's still a pretty good game.