I still remember the days when leaving your own home was dangerous. It was a trying time for a lot of people, myself included. So it’s no surprise that sometimes, all you want is to just boot up a cozy game to give yourself a sort of escape from what was going on in the world.
Potion Permit is one such game that caught my interest at first, but since its release in 2022, it has seen loads of quality of life improvements and patches.
A Grand Welcome (Or Not…) to Moonsbury!
Potion Permit’s story starts with you, a budding chemist, who is called by the small town of Moonsbury to come as the representative of the Medical Association in order to aid the mayor’s daughter. However, the relationship between the two is, well, let’s just say it’s not at its best.
Indeed, everyone is skeptical of you. How can a budding chemist from the capital solve the problems in town after several incidents that damaged the island’s biology involving said chemists will make the people suddenly believe in you? And that’s exactly what your goal is: to cure their ailments, and to regain their trust.
Collect Items and Brew Potions!
The main gameplay of Potion Permit is extremely simple. First, you must go out into the wilds and forage for ingredients to be used. There are four different elements: Fire, Water, Wind and Earth. Each ingredient has a different type of shape that it fills. Think of them as Tetris pieces.
Once you’ve filled all of the spots of a given recipe, the game will craft that item for you. A cool part of this mechanic is that there is no one way to craft a potion. You can really get creative with your ingredient usage. Furthermore, once you’ve crafted a recipe enough times, you can save the ingredients you’ve used.
Perhaps the only issues you’ll run into is with recipes that restrict certain ingredient elements from being utilized, and your Cauldron capacity being your main bottleneck, which starts at only five ingredients, upgradeable to ten.
Sound The Alarm! Someone Has Fallen Ill!
Every morning after you wake up, if a villager has fallen ill, they’ll be carried to the Clinic, which triggers an alarm. This is where a countdown begins. Success will give you some gold and some Moon Cloves, depending on how quick you are to administer the treatment. Fail to do so however, and the villagers will grow dissatisfied with you. Luckily, treatment will never require a potion you are unable to make.
Furthermore, you can also work as a part-timer across various locations of the city, where you’ll engage in several minigames whose commands range from pressing buttons in a given order, to grinding grapes by mashing the X button. They’re all pretty simple, and you get a small amount of money for your troubles.
Still, the only uses that ingredients are given outside potion making are through the Community Board and story-required quests. Practical, I suppose, but I feel there should’ve been a way to at least sell surplus ingredients for some extra income, or maybe a way to easily obtain Wood and Stone outside of foraging.
Now, here comes a part that can be a tad frustrating. Everything, from cauldron upgrades to your tools relies on three main materials: Wood, Stone and Gold. This wouldn’t be an issue per se, but in later parts of the game, this can get increasingly annoying to go for some of the upgrades, especially since you can only get so much of them each day, considering your stamina and how much time you have in a given day.
Romance? Ehh, Sort Of
Another aspect of Potion Permit is that interacting with the villagers is something that…I wouldn’t blame if you forgot, because you can basically spend the entire game without even meeting them all, and even though there is an option for you to romance a select few of them, regardless of your gender, all you get for your trouble is an extra entry on your Journal about them.
Furthermore, every villager, and I mean every single one of them only accepts a single gift: Moon Cloves. They’re not hard to obtain, requiring only completing quests from the Community Board, or by treating patients at the Clinic.
Even so, this just takes the fun out of gift-giving, in my opinion. It makes things easy, for sure, but it feels like a missed opportunity to get more variety to the gifts so you could know which villager likes what, like in games such as Stardew Valley and the Story of Seasons series.
Cute Pixel-Like Graphics
Potion Permit features a pixel-like art style, very reminiscent of PlayStation games of the late 1990s to the 2000s. I personally liked it, although I wish the characters had a bit more to their expressions. Instead of the sprites themselves changing, a bubble containing a blob will cue the player on what the character’s feeling, but I feel that a bit more variety of the sprites would go a long way.
Regarding performance, the game runs very smoothly on PlayStation 5, and features an almost seamless “no loading screen” aspect, where it takes less than a second for the areas to load. Sure, you do notice a slight stutter, but it’s so minor, you barely notice it.
A Grindy Platinum
When it comes to replayability, Potion Permit takes roughly 20 hours if all you want is to “clear” the main story. Although, “clear” is a term I use rather loosely here, as it’s a game where you’re sort of expected to play for a long time, grinding away earning yourself some funds, healing your patients whenever duty calls, and maybe eventually, falling in love with your dearly beloved.
I’d say that around 12 to 15 hours in, it’s likely that you will have already seen what the game has to offer, given that there are only a total of three whole areas to explore. Furthermore, the calendar system is limited to just having the seven days of the week, and there are not any festivals you can participate in.
There are a total of 38 trophies you can obtain, and they’re all relatively simple, and just consist of doing your usual tasks in-game, including your part-time jobs. However, the hardest trophies, in my opinion, would be the “Being a donut…” one. See, the way you obtain this trophy is that you must fail to cure 10 patients.
Honestly, the repercussions for failing to cure patients is not worth the damage to your reputation. The moment they start to hate you, the game heavily restricts your interaction with villagers. If you’re a trophy hunter, perhaps it’s worth considering this trophy for last, or creating a separate save file for such a thing.
A Complete Edition With Some Incomplete Seams
Overall, Potion Permit is a really good game, with a charming cast of characters for you to know more. It features an easy-to-grasp, no nonsense gameplay mechanics that make it easy to pick it up and play. It’s definitely the type of game you can play while sipping a warm cup of coffee on a weekend.
Still, the later parts of the game definitely suffers from extreme repetition. Despite the developers touting the fact that this is the Complete Edition, including all of the game’s DLC, it still feels insufficient in some points, with any frustrating elements that feel half-baked and unimplemented.
Joys
- Easygoing gameplay that is easy to grasp
- Really good performance on PS5
Cons
- Feels rather “incomplete” for the Complete Edition
- Can feel repetitive, especially in later portions of the game
