Sunday, May 19, 2024
There's a lot of simulators out there. Some of them are pretty odd. Along with truck driving, farming, construction, power washing, and gunsmithing, you can play as a medieval alchemist!
Your job is pretty simple. You're an alchemist looking for a place to live, you find an abandoned alchemist shop and set up your own business. Your job is to make potions for the people that come in looking for help for their various ailments.
In the beginning, you'll have a variety of simple herbs to concoct your potions. There's a little patch of ground outside of the house where you can pick herbs and mushrooms. Every once in a while somebody will stop by with some herbs, mushrooms, or crystals to buy. As you give them potions to access more herbs, mushrooms and crystals, you'll get more of a variety of ingredients.
Making the potions involves a really interesting game mechanism I haven't seen before. Each potion ingredient has a certain 'path.' When you grind it up with your mortar and pestle and add it to the cauldron, it will guide your bottle along the path. The various potions you'll be creating are scattered around a map.
You'll need a really delicate touch to grind the herb, mushroom or crystal to just the right amount. When you've added the ingredient to the cauldron, you'll stir the pot until the bottle reaches the target. Be careful as you stir, so that the bottle ends up exactly where you want it to create a 'strong' version of the potion, which will get the best price from your customer. Then you pump the bellows to create the potion. You can customize your potion with bottle size, shape, and the symbol. After all that work you went through, you're going to want to save your potions in a recipe book, which includes the customized look of the potion.
Customer satisfaction is tracked, and as you gain more experience you'll get more money from the potions. Every once in a while a bad person will come by and ask for something to do harm to somebody, and your reaction will dictate your character path.
To make things even more complicated, there's an alchemist machine in the basement that you'll repair and make more exotic ingredients with.
This game is still in development. The game designers plan to add a farm, a mushroom cave, a pond to grow water plants, and a place to gather crystals for your own potions. They're still figuring out how to animate the plants' growth patterns. "The crystal grotto is the most enigmatic space in the garden. How does one plant a crystal? Do they require watering? How long do they take to grow? These are all excellent questions that we will address another time!" Players of Potion Craft are looking forward to these updates, including new planting, upkeep, and harvesting systems. The developers are also trying to figure out transitional growing phases, the necessity of daily watering, and even what the stump of the plant would look like after it's been harvested.
"There is a lot of work ahead of us on updating and enhancing the garden mechanics, and we will share the sweetest fruits of this development in further devlogs, so stay tuned and follow our Steam Page and join our Discord so you don't miss other upcoming devlogs! Meanwhile, please share what garden improvements you would like to see in the game the most."
Not everybody likes to play a game that's still in early development, but it's a lot of fun and a low-stress kind of game. I've spent 109 hours on it so far and they haven't released the full version yet.
Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator is available on SteamOS from developer niceplay games, publisher TinyBuild.
