Alchemy sim Potion Craft by Niceplay Games and publisher TinyBuild is out now on Steam Early Access.
The game tasks you to run your own shop, and you’ll have to learn mixing ingredients to concoct useful potions to sell to the townsfolk.
The potion crafting aspect of Potion Craft is what sets it apart. Ingredients can be mashed in the mortar and pestle, heated up, mixed and more.
And it’s not just a mini-game that need doing. How much you grind your ingredients, how long and how much heat you put on the cauldron all will change the result of your created potion. There’s a requirement to experiment with your potion crafting, and learning how exactly to create specific potions and tonics.
A very handy moving chart will help you to visualise the changes to the ingredient mix or the process you need to do in order to get the mix into the right sweet spot. You know how you can adjust the seasoning and cooking heat as you go along while cooking? That’s a mechanic in Potion Craft.
On the storefront, you can haggle with customers or help specific people that you can befriend (or don’t help them and make feuds). On the back garden, you can choose to grow your own ingredients, or buy from merchants at a higher price, unless you haggle them too.
All of this is presented in a medieval-inspired painting aesthetic, which includes tavern music.
Potion Craft is still in Early Access, with more features to be implemented. More kinds of alchemical ingredients, now potion bases, a dynamically-generated queue of visitors system, and more content in general are currently in the pipeline. But the core gameplay loop is pretty much set in stone and ready.
Potion Craft is out now in Steam Early Access.