Potion Craft
Review

Potion Craft (2021) is a puzzle adventure game where you create potions in an ancient looking workshop to send you bottle around the map. You combine ingredients, fire and water to move your bottle along the map to the target location and brew a potion to help your village. It looks like a cooking game, but is in fact a Chess-like movement puzzle where you steer your bottle to the perfect spot like a Golfing hole-in-one.

You interact and manipulate your potions physically using the different tools in the kitchen. You drag ingredients into the cauldron, cranking the bellows, stir the soup and even throw your potions around the shop. Each action results in a different movement of your bottle on the map.

It starts off seeming like an educational game about making potions but soon becomes much more. The brewing of potions acts as a means of exploring a map. Each ingredient has a predetermined path, a little like a chess piece. You can string them together in a potion to get to the location you require. In addition to the combinations you can also dilute and pause reactions to access hard to reach spots on the map.

As you craft useful potions you can name them for later use and sell them to the townsfolk you meet. Each day customers arrive in your store looking for solutions to their problems. How well you help or hinder them results in consequences for you and the story. Do well and you can attract guilds, befriend notable figures (or feud with them), gain riches and influence.

There is also a lite farming aspect to the game. Here, instead of buying the leaves, flowers, berries, roots, fruits, minerals, and mushrooms from traveling merchant you can grow your own. You can even brand your potions with custom bottle shapes, labels, icons, and colours.

Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Potion Craft 2 years ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated a year ago.