Looking as if it’s been torn straight out of an alchemist’s journal, Potion Craft is a beautiful simulation recreation that’s positive to attraction to the mystically inclined, though — oddly — it looks like a nasty match on Switch. Arriving on Nintendo’s console one 12 months after its PC and Xbox launch, it places you within the sneakers of a ‘ye olde’ village alchemist working a retailer and following a each day cycle of harvesting elements and crafting with them.
As the alchemist, you could be requested to create potions for farmers, battle mages, hunters, and even one thing a bit darker, like a potion of necromancy. There’s a morality scoring system of kinds. If you serve prospects with evil intentions, your morality ranking will go down and extra ne’er-do-wells will come to you. You’ll have to resolve what sort of alchemist you need to be.
Potion Craft’s chapter-based gameplay loop is repetitive, however in a manner that can really feel worthwhile for seasoned simulation followers. You might want to harvest or buy each particular person ingredient, mash all of them up, combine them in the suitable portions, and warmth them up. Following these steps will, in flip, transfer a potion bottle icon on the map in direction of completely different goals. Different recipes are hidden in between obstacles, and exploration clears away the clouds masking hidden areas.
The recreation doesn’t change a lot as you progress. The potions get trickier to seek out however the act of creating them doesn’t get any more durable. The prospects and distributors are the identical every single day, however their requests get a bit extra particular and fascinating. The sense of development right here comes from the potion e book. There are heaps of potions that may be crafted and they are often customised completely.
One challenge that we bumped into throughout our playthrough is that utilizing the water jug to return the potion bottle to the centre may typically trigger the sport to crash. A memory-related challenge, maybe — we managed to treatment this with a system restart and by deleting fairly just a few Switch information, nevertheless it was irritating and reset the day’s progress every time that it occurred. There are additionally some hefty loading instances to take a seat via when beginning up the sport.
Unfortunately, Potion Craft doesn’t really feel at residence on Switch. While the sport definitely has a transparent aesthetic attraction, the textual content is difficult to learn, the icons are onerous to differentiate, and it doesn’t supply any accessibility choices of notice. The button controls depart a bit to be desired, too; we discovered ourselves enjoying with the touchscreen for the overwhelming majority of our playthrough. Getting a max-level potion requires you to line up the potion bottles completely – and that is very tough, frustratingly so at instances.
Potion Craft is certain to be a gem for the suitable viewers and is good for devoted completionist crafters who take pleasure in sim video games with strategic parts and cosy, magical aesthetics. It’s a heady concoction, only one that does not go down very properly on Switch.
