The Magical Mixture Mill has a strong pitch. What if a game about making potions and selling them, has automated factory builder elements? It’s a promising concoction of two disparate genres that might work.
Developer Glowlight still has to do a lot more work to perfect this genre blend, but during this state of Early Access so far, The Magical Mixture Mill has proved that it has the foundation to be at least a good game.
The Magical Mixture Mill sees you, a retired adventurer whose adventuring days are over, taking on the task of becoming the apprentice of Griselda’s Magical Mixtures. With the help of the sweet old lady and your goblin “assistant”, you will be making and selling potions for the shop.
I’d argue the main hook of The Magical Mixture Mill is the automation aspects of the potion brewing, but fascinatingly, and rather disappointingly, it takes a good couple of hours before the game lets you properly mess around with making potion assembly lines.
For the first 3-5 or so, I’ve spent most of time went jaunting to and fro the woods and the quarry to chop wood, harvest mushrooms and pick stones. Think Stardew Valley where most of the appeal is the relaxing resource gathering and crafting. You’ll be spending most of the time doing that.
And it does raise a question: how do you fully automate the potion-making if the resources needed to be gathered outside of the shop? In most automation factory builders, you build the factories and assembly lines around the resource point. But in The Magical Mixture Mill, all potion-making machinery is placed under a basement where the shop is.
So whether you like it or not, you’ll be spending every morning manually restocking resources to get the production line running. And then manually take all the potions and stock them to the shop front to sell to the various adventurers that make up your clientele.
On that note, I love that you don’t really need to have the finished potions outputted into a box. If you don’t do that, it will just be lying on the floor, waiting for you to suck it all into your inventory like it’s a 90s platforming collect-a-thon game. Every in-game morning I look forward to see the mess that lies on the production floor, and then satisfyingly suck them all up.
The Magical Mixture Mill nails its presentation already. Screenshots may present it as some typical generic fantasy environment, which it is, but the way the game runs in motion sells it. The player character saunters rather jauntingly, and then the other NPCs also have their own movement animations. Chuck the warrior just chucks out his whole shoulder with every step he takes, menacingly and clumsily. It’s great. The game could use more audio ques and beats, though. Getting stung and attacked by bees and wild plantlife that bites back is more hilarious if the player character audibly suffers. I don’t think the game is funny yet, but it is whimsy.
There is another issue I have with The Magical Mixture Mill, and it’s how slow the progression can be. You can do a lot of things to improve your potion-making business but all of it require a large some of money. Whether it being expanding the workshop area, or investing in other business to unlock perks, building bridges to unlock the new biomes where new materials and ingredients can be found, or even just building new potion-making machines, all of them require a significant amount of money. The problem is, after the tutorial, the game becomes too aimless in the way that you really don’t have a feel which way is the optimal way to progress. I ended up doing the boring chore of going back and forth to chop wood, harvest mushrooms and pick stones over and over. When I should have unlocked the import/export feature.
That import/export feature should’ve been unlocked during the formal tutorial phase. Because it solves a lot of the frustrations I had when I repeatedly go back and forth to chop wood, harvest mushrooms and pick stones over and over. Inventory is limited, and building chests to store item is not cheap. The chimney used to import and export items also double as a storage compartment, and that saves a lot of time and resources required to craft more chests as you hoard more items that you don’t get to use for potion-making yet because the machinery costs too much. And instead of hoarding, you can offload the resources you don’t need right now (i.e. all of the edible mushrooms) and export them for cash. Later on, through investing on other businesses, you can import materials directly so you don’t need to go out and about to chop wood, harvest mushrooms and pick stones over and over. Though as it stands right now, there is no way to import chopped wood.
Maybe it’s just me, but I really don’t find the “chop wood, harvest mushrooms and pick stones over and over” aspect of the game to be engaging. You can pick a class for your character and that determines your “origin skill” which is an ability you can use to harvest items faster. The three choices present now in the Early Access build feel inconsequential. And between using that skill and the tool-specific skill, holding down the mouse as you slowly chop wood, harvest mushrooms and pick stones over and over doesn’t feel as relaxing as it should be.
The UI is still in a rough state. The objective overlay panel is intrusive and even blocks the inventory interface. The icons that indicate what you picked up and what quantity requires some squinting to see and additional squinting to see the numbers which is overlayed on top of the material icon (maybe consider making it like a notification badge with numbers attached to the top-right side of the icon as you see in phone apps?)
Closing Thoughts
My overall takeaway of the current Early Access build of The Magical Mixture Mill, right now at launch, is that it takes too long to get going, and by the time you get going the Early Access content dries up. At this rate, I think I’ll need to spend 10 hours total to really start messing about with making spaghetti conveyor belts and a messy production line.
There is depth to the magic brewing system. Mixing ingredients is key to create the perfect potion, and messing up do have consequences (like machines blowing up). The assembly line itself as it is right now is rather lacking. There are no splitter/merger pieces so you’ll be building individual assembly lines which means no opportunity to make spaghetti chaos of overly-complicated conveyor belt lines which means this is not magical Factorio, at least not yet.
Should you get The Magical Mixture Mill right now? If you fancy a different style of Stardew Valley, it’s fun for a good 5 hours or so. Don’t expect to be building factories yet. If you are, like me, inclined toward the automation aspects, maybe just wishlist The Magical Mixture Mill for now. The devs are promising more features to be added if they pass certain milestones, like fishing. But I hope they lean further in the factory-making bit. I look forward to seeing the game continues to improve during the Early Access period.
Reviewed on PC. Review code provided by the publisher