When buying a healing potion in another RPG, have you thought about the process of their production? In Potion Tycoon, a magic shop management sim, this question forms the basis of the gameplay, and the player has to develop an unusual business. I have already built a cozy shop, created fancy potions, set up production and managed to go bankrupt more than once – I hasten to share my impressions in the preview.
Developer: Showbound Games
Publisher: Daedalic Entertainment
Release Date (Early Access): March 13, 2023
In 2021, I wrote about Potion Craft – a game similar to Potion Tycoon, but in it we run a small shop with a cozy garden in the yard. Immediately, we are offered to create a real fantasy production with boiling boilers in the dungeon, shop windows full of goods, and a constant race with competitors for a place in the sun.
Potion Tycoon is rich in mechanics, even too much, and you will understand this as soon as you start the tutorial – in this mode, the game hastily goes through the main points and leaves one on one with an already debugged business. While you figure out what’s going on here, the budget will be empty, local publications will leave negative reviews about the shop, and employees will refuse to work without pay.
Learning in the early version of Potion Tycoon is frightening, it turned out to be unsuccessful, but I don’t recommend putting an end to this – it’s better to immediately restart the game and start from scratch. It’s funny, but it is in the campaign that they gradually understand the mechanics and build a business brick by brick, and not in chaos.
Conventionally, I divided the gameplay into two closely related parts – the management of the shop and the production of potions. But before you can start managing the store, you need to build it – Potion Tycoon offers to build underground caves for work and living quarters for recreation, and you can connect them using a ladder.
The picture is two-dimensional, but in terms of creativity they let it roam – you can change the size of the rooms, and as the business develops, my shop has turned into a kind of medieval castle. We were pleased with decor items: instead of paintings and flowers, there are skulls, coffins and other sinister attributes.
The business process in Potion Tycoon is similar to the real one, and if you describe it in detail, the preview will turn out to be too cumbersome. We have to equip the premises, hire goblin employees for various positions, monitor overtime, pay salaries, expand if things go well, or, on the contrary, sell unnecessary equipment in a hurry and even take out a loan – business is business, even in a fantasy world.
Employees deserve a separate paragraph. Potion Tycoon has several positions (alchemist, mechanic, clerk, operator), for each you can hire several goblins. Those have characteristics, levels and skills, and with development, you can cross the skills of different specialists and get a universal fighter. At the same time, employees can and will be capricious – either they will not like the arrangement of the premises, or they will get tired and go to sleep, paralyzing production.
However, the employee management system turned out to be not the most thoughtful. By default, they perform all functions at once and run from one position to another, and you need to assign them to rooms manually. For some reason, goblins don’t know how to unload an overflowing warehouse, in such a situation they just stand idle. Employee management in Potion Tycoon is yet to be finalized.
Potions are at the heart of this business, and the process of making them is fun and rich in detail. So, first you have to mix ingredients (mushrooms, plants and others) with different properties, then work on packaging, set a price and even think about marketing by contacting the appropriate department in your shop.
Various factors affect the attractiveness and price – the potion may turn out to be too bitter, unrefined or, on the contrary, spicy. There are also other parameters that do not need to be described – just know that you will have to constantly experiment with potions, and this is quite interesting.
There is also a technology tree in Potion Tycoon, and it turned out to be quite extensive for early access: you have to master 5 stages from beginner to grand master. Technology opens up new gameplay possibilities or simplifies work, this is not surprising, but the variety is impressive.
When the shop is built, the premises are equipped, the employees are happy and the assortment of potions can be called attractive – the game only then begins to open up, but not in a pleasant way.
Potion Tycoon can definitely be called hardcore – there are many competitors, and they are developing too quickly. It’s impossible to keep up: buyers are divided into 4 groups, and each wants its own goods, and of impeccable quality. It will take a lot of time and resources to create the perfect potions, and no one will buy goods of mediocre quality.
As a result, I got into debt, but the situation did not improve in any way, which forced me to start all over again – and so on for several games in a row. Even at such moments, the undeveloped mechanics of personnel management are annoying, since short-term downtime greatly affects the business.
There are clearly problems with the balance in Potion Tycoon, with its complexity it will scare away rather than force you to press the restart button again. I hope that the game will be a little more forgiving by the release, as in its current form it is difficult to enjoy the gameplay.
However, for the early access stage, the game turned out to be good – there are problems, but they are fixable, and there are much more pluses: these are a variety of game mechanics, and content-rich gameplay, and an interesting system for creating potions, and nice cartoon graphics. We recommend that you add it to your favorites and follow the development, because if the developers succeed, Potion Tycoon will become a worthy representative of its genre.
Potion Tycoon в Steam
