Potionomics: Masterwork Edition Review (PS5)

So many things to do, so little time. Oh no, I better make those competition potions!

I can’t believe I was finally able to play Potionomics. I’ve been wanting to play this ever since it came out two years ago and have been patiently waiting for a console release after seeing that it was confirmed. Not even this being part deckbuilder turned me away. You have no idea how excited I was when I finally heard the console version had a release date and it was right by my birthday! So, what do I think about it now after playing it?

In Potionomics, you play as Sylvia. We start the game reading the postcards she received from her Uncle Oswald who moved to an island known as Rafta to pursue his dream of opening his own potion shop. He chose Rafta, instead of where he lived, due to the island just being opened again after the events of a harrowing battle with Maven the Witch Queen and, due to the experiments she did, caused the land to be rich with magic, or magimins. Oswald was the first to step onto Rafta when it was deemed habitable again and he was able to open his potion shop. However, it seems he didn’t last too long before he died. Luckily, Oswald did already have a plan in place for this scenario as he not only pre-wrote a postcard if he had an early death, but also put Sylvia down on his will so she can inherit his shop. After all, Sylvia was practically following in his footsteps.

Good news, Sylvia just graduated from the Academy and is a full-fledged potions witch with a license to prove it. Which definitely helps as she needs to be there in person to accept her inheritance. Bad news, Oswald had a ton of debt and that means Sylvia didn’t just inherit the shop. She also inherited Oswald’s debt. And if she wants to keep her newly inherited shop, she needs to pay it up. At least she can pay it off with a payment plan…except each payment requires a huge amount of coins that she can’t possibly get together in time. Well, good news, the solution literally comes falling from the ceiling as a talking owl, named Owl, not only enlists himself in helping her out but also tells her about a series of competitions that coincidentally falls on the days her payments are due and the reward money is exactly the amount due. So, all Sylvia needs to do is keep her new shop running, brew up the required potions, and win each competition. Easy! Well, not really, but you have to stay positive.

That’s not all that Potionomics offers story-wise. As you progress through the game, the main storyline of Sylvia progressing through the competition isn’t the only aspect present. You’ll also slowly uncover the backstories of Sylvia and the various characters, the history of Rafta, and have the worldbuilding of Potionomic’s world gets ever clearer. In fact, the characters are basically the star of the show. While Sylvia will come across the average Rafta resident, there are 11 characters that you can have her befriend (and even romance), some with their own businesses and some here for some hero work. They even have their own mini-storyline as you go through their relationship path where you get to know them more, get to know what they’re currently doing or the progress they’ve made, and some even have information that you won’t be privy to elsewhere. Like Quinn, the sassy potion ingredients vender who is also clairvoyant and may drag Sylvia into his shenanigans; Mint the optimistic hero newbie who has always dreamed about becoming a hero, but also has a bit of an imposter syndrome; and Baptiste who runs the local Hero Guild and starts off seeming like the average rich boy but quickly becomes clear that he’s trying his best and he came to Rafta because he wanted to make a difference.

Plus, there are the competition rivals which do really well in getting you to hate them enough to where you want to kick their butts in the competition, but not so much that it ruins the few that end up sticking around.

I honestly loved the story and characters here. Potionomics honestly does a great job in drip feeding its story and worldbuilding in a way that doesn’t cause any confusion. You may go a while before you get to the next cutscene, whether it’s for the main story or a relationship rank up, but I do think this approach was a great idea for this kind of game and the setting. The game trusts its players to already know the basics of how magic is incorporated into worldbuilding in other works, which saves time as there’s no need for expositions or a lot of lore dumping and casts a suspension of disbelief on players so you just roll with it. As you progress, you just get more specifics on this game’s world alongside the history of Rafta and the backstories of the characters you befriend. And talking about the characters, all of the characters were written really well. I loved talking and getting to know everyone and there’s definitely at least one character that you’d want to romance. Potionomics does a great job at introducing each character, writing their hangouts, and slowly revealing their backstories and progressing through whatever they’re currently going through. The friendship (or romance) Sylvia develops between everyone feels genuine as well. I also loved Sylvia as a character, her spunky attitude is perfect for a main character in the position she finds herself in, has a great dynamic with just about every character, and you love to see her grow as you get further into the game.

There are also a couple twists that this game has, which you do get subtle hints at before they’re revealed. Funnily enough, there is a twist that gets revealed around halfway through the story which I honestly guessed a couple days before it got revealed. Partly due to my rising suspicions and partly cause I thought it would be funny. The only thing is that I am a bit disappointed with an aspect of the ending.

Potionomics does have a simple loop of brewing potions and selling them, but there are a lot of mechanics and systems that get added in to make this more complex and engaging. This game takes place over the course of 50 days that are split up into 5 weeks (technically it’s 10 days and not 7, but hey this is how the game is split up and it’s an easy shorthand). There is also time management here, as each day is made up of six time slots and certain actions will take time to do and certain things will also take time to complete as well.

Brewing is pretty simple. There are a good range of potions you can brew up and each one has a recipe. Don’t worry, it’s not specific. Each potion takes certain magimins (there being five different types) and a certain balance of those magimins to successfully brew it. Each ingredient Sylvia will be able to get her hands on are made up of magimins and a certain amount. So, you can use any ingredients as long as it satisfies the magimin requirement. In addition, the more magimins are in the potion batch, the higher quality it will be and the more potion bottles it’ll fill. You can also have the quality increase after brewing by keeping the magimins balances, with the more balanced they are the more stars that will be added. There are six tiers to every potion and after five stars, it upgrades to the next tier (which is, of course, more valuable). The higher tier potions also means more time for them to brew, but luckily you can decrease this time by adding fuel to the cauldron’s fire. In addition, you’ll also be introduced to ingredients with traits, where good traits will increase the potion’s value and bad traits will decrease it.

Once you have those potions brewing and progress time so you can bottle them up, it’s time to sell them. After putting them on your shelves, and maybe some on the display shelves to entice some passersby to come in and make a purchase. Opening your shop takes up two time slots and selling potions bring in the deckbuilding part of the game up to the forefront. Once a customer comes up with a potion they want to buy, you can haggle the price up. You do this with the cards you have in your haggle deck, which you need to edit before opening the shop, to increase their interest and thus the price. However, you also need to balance the customer’s patience and Sylvia’s stress. Sylvia’s stress serves as Sylvia’s health and the chance you’ll draw stress cards (which is bad and will add more stress if they’re still in your hand at the end of your turn). The customer’s patience also serves two roles, the cost to play a card and how long you have before the customer will just walk out on you. Ending a turn will cost patience, customers also get a turn and you do see what they’ll do (from decreasing their patience or shielding themselves to de-buffing you), and you can close a deal early if you see that ending your turn will cause their patience to reach zero. Each customer starts out with a set amount of patience and so many interest levels they have before they have max interest.

There are various card types and each card have certain effects that reflect the character you got them from. Some are openers where it adds an additional effect if played first in a turn, some adds some block so you can block some stress from the customer’s turn, raises interest or patience, lets you draw cards, causes an effect like granting you a buff or messing with the customer’s buffs, and closers which closes the deal when played but not before adding last minute interest and maybe even an effect. This brings in the complexity as you need to think about which card would be more optimal to play as just playing a card without looking may result in accidentally using a closer card too soon, or finding out you’d be in a better position if you played the card you played last first. Once a deal closes, the customer will pay up and it’s the next customer until you deal with all of them and close the shop. You do also get other ways to sell potions, like accepting and fulfilling custom orders.

A lot of customers are generic, but every so often you do get the romanceable characters coming in to buy a potion. They are still brutal, and it hits harder since you know them, but it is a bit funny using their own haggling tips against them. Even though they don’t react to you doing it.

There are, of course, more than just brewing and selling. You need a way to get the ingredients you need to brew the potions in the first place and there are a couple ways you can do that. You can buy them from Quinn, who does hold a limited amount of each ingredient; or get them through the Hero Guild either by setting heroes off with potions in various locations on adventures or investing in expeditions with Baptiste where you can invest to get as many ingredients you want from each and get a chance at getting a rare ingredient from that area. Not to mention you can give new ingredients you acquire to Quinn so you can buy it from their shop. You can buy more cauldrons and shelves with Muktuk and upgrade them so you’ll be able to make more and more advanced potions. Eventually, you’ll have potions that brew for a long time (and honestly anything past taking two time slots is long in this game) and to do that you need fuel. You can just hope the heroes will bring back fuel from their adventures, but you can buy fuel from Saffron. Saffron also gives you a way to upgrade your shop so you can have more cauldrons to brew multiple potions at once and have space to have multiple shelves so you have the potential of selling more potions each time you open. There are even some more things that the game adds so you have a lot of options and ways to turn things in your favor.

The characters that Sylvia can befriend also brings in more than just what they offer through their shop. You can hangout with them to relieve some stress and increase your relationship with them by trading in some time (of course). You can gift them an ingredient as a present to get some relationship points. And finally, ranking up your relationship with them not only gives you another scene with them, but also grants you a new card from their character deck so you can add it to your haggle deck if you want to (giving you more options and strategies as you amass more cards) and a coupon for their shop at Rank 4. With an upgrade to that coupon at Rank 8. Plus, you can pursue a romantic relationship with them if you particularly love them. Though you do need to pick enough flirting dialogue options (you do also get a dialogue choice where you can start the new rank up with a couple relationship points).

Also, don’t forget to make your competition potions before the last day! The potion competition closes off the week and takes up the whole day. And it means the whole day as it will start with Sylvia at the competition. You need to set just enough time and resources so you can brew the potions you need and have them in your inventory. Once you’re there, it’s two out of three and you can win either by bringing in a potion that is worth more than your opponent’s or haggle your price up above theirs. If you win two rounds, you get to proceed to the next week! If you don’t, you either reload a previous save or restart all over on Day 1.

It’s a lot to balance and keep a track of. Time management is tight and playing on Cozy difficulty does help elevate some of that time management stress. It certainly doesn’t help that progressing to the next week also means the next tier of options in shops, adventuring locations, and potion types; while also increasing the difficulty through various aspects like the potion requirements for the next competition, making custom orders more specific, the new adventuring locations being harder for your heroes, and I swear the customers get a bit harder to deal with. Plus, some mechanics are barred until you hit a certain day milestone. And I didn’t even mention the daily events, which also gives a couple random effects for at least a day. This can range from being useful like increasing the value to certain potions or decreasing ingredient prices, or hurts you by increasing the price of ingredients or causing adventuring locations to have stronger enemies.

Potionomic’s console editions don’t have the subtitle of “Masterworks Edition” for nothing as this does come with some new additions to the game. Honestly, I had no idea these were coming, but they really do help elevate the game. For consoles specifically, the Boss Finn DLC is already packaged in. This basically adds Boss Finn, the third competitor Sylvia goes up against, as an interactable character with his own shop, friendship/romance path, and cards that get unlocked as you rank him up. For everyone, there were a handful of new additions that were definitely welcomed even to someone like me who is just playing it for the first time. Two new difficulty levels were added: Cozy, where it takes away time consumption for travel and ranking up relationships as well as making competitions a bit easier; and Capitalism which makes regular customers and competitions more difficult. With Classic difficulty being what the game was released with, but with some balancing adjustments. Another option was also added where you can now select to be able to romance multiple characters instead of one. This can’t be changed mid-game sadly, but it does help in taking away a hard choice of who to romance if you liked more than one character like I did. There’s also an Endless Mode that unlocks after you finish the story on Day 50. All while I was playing I was thinking how having an endless mode would be nice, especially with how tight it is trying to max rank your relationship with everyone is, before I found out it was indeed added in. And finally, voice acting was added!

I liked the gameplay here. I’m not that great at deckbuilders, so that was one aspect I was already at a disadvantage and know I wouldn’t like, but even so I did end up enjoying everything else. The characters were basically most of the reason why I wanted to play Potionomics and I loved them and getting to know them over the course of the game (plus, I was interested in seeing how the main story would progress and how it would end). I liked how many options you got for the various mechanics and aspects of the game, liked figuring out the best way to brew up a potion I wanted, and also liked seeing all the stuff that came with the next week even though it does bring in some stress. Talking about that, this game is pretty stressed and surprisingly tiring, even on Cozy difficulty. You juggle a lot and man I’m glad I came in with the Masterworks Edition as I know I would have struggled so hard. In fact, I know as my first playthrough was on Classic difficulty and I wasn’t able to get past Week 1. Classic difficulty really has you planning out the whole day and you can’t make the disastrous mistake of accidentally going back home instead of going to the next shop you needed to visit next. This causes the downside of discouraging multiple playthroughe, but the upside is that it does make this game pretty rewarding.

For that, I really do recommend saving on Day 2, so you don’t have to go through the Day 1 tutorializing again, the start of a new week if you don’t want to restart from the very beginning again, and before certain things like before editing your deck or for Luna’s marketing.

There are a few negatives that I found myself finding in Potionomics. When you’re brewing potions, unless you freshly started brewing in a cauldron, the cursor is going to snap to the place you last got an ingredient from each time you click a filter option. While a part of me knows that needing the cauldron/shelf you want to upgrade in your inventory makes sense, a part of me also found it annoying. I did also find that Luna’s Marketing won’t carry over to the next day like it’s supposed to if you don’t play the next day during that play session. Maybe this is due to the daily events rerolling when you reload no matter if its the beginning of the day or at night, instead of rerolling and locking it in, but this is very annoying. It not only wastes the money you spent to have Luna do the marketing, but also makes brewing the potions ahead of time a waste too. I did also had one instance where the game hanged between finishing the haggle and when the customer would walk out, leaving Sylvia and the customer just staring at each other, until I restarted the game (and thus restarted the whole day). This may sound weird, but I also did wish you could specifically filter bad traits.

Other than that, I wished stress didn’t snowball the way it does and drawing stress cards can feel unfair. I did also think custom orders could have benefited from them not getting as specific as they do the further you get into the game. I stopped fulfilling them in the middle of Week 2, both since customers start requesting specific good traits (which are easy to miss) and it just doesn’t seem worth it money-wise. It would have also been nice having a glossary for the ingredients and being able to save a recipe for each potion tier so you can auto dump the ingredients into the cauldron if you want to. I did also wish that the first week at least had an extra day or two. That way, you can have more time to get used to things and gives a way to skip the tutorials since it wouldn’t be a part of the week proper. I also did wish you could keep some of the prize money. Sure, the reward is being able to progress to the next week, but it would feel even better if you could keep some of the prize money to get a jumpstart on the next week.

To round this all out, Potionomics can’t have done a better job with its music, visuals, and voice acting. The music is great here, being able to suit the situation, while also giving it a hint of magic across, and I love how each character had a theme which suited them and helped characterize them a bit more. I think my favorite has to be the track for a certain pair of cats. The visuals was my favorite and was what drew me. I loved the artwork for the various cards, ingredients, and other things. I especially loved the character designs for everyone and their in-game models. Everyone looks so good and they’re animated really well. They’re really expressive, but it doesn’t cross the line to where it’s too much or too noticeable. The only thing is that I did feel the lip animation was weird for some characters, but you do get used to it. And last, but not least, the voice acting is amazing here. I had no idea that voice acting was coming and it was such a nice surprise. Some lines are weirdly cut off early, but everyone fits their character perfectly. Not to mention that everyone’s delivery was spot on, elevating scenes and making jokes even funnier. The jokes still land without voice acting, and there are some visual jokes as well, but the voice actors sell those jokes even more.

Verdict

Overall, I liked Potionomics and I’m glad I was able to finally jump in with the Masterworks Edition. I mainly came in for the characters and that did not disappoint as I loved getting to know all the characters and seeing their design in action. I also really liked the main story, even though most of it is getting through all the competitions, as it does well giving Sylvia a goal to achieve and motivation. It certainly helps that the writing really suits the game well. Other than that, while I’m still not good at deckbuilders and card games, I did overall enjoy the gameplay loop and the various mechanics that this game has that bled into one another. I also really liked how many options you get to get your hands on ingredients and turning the tide in your favor. And no matter how stressed I got, I did like strategizing on what I should do, if I should use certain ingredients or spend money on certain ingredients, and it was rewarding hitting goals (especially so if I hit them early).

Though, while I definitely do think Potionomics is worth the price, it’s not for everyone. This is definitely not the casual experience that you’d expect just by looking at the screenshots, even on Cozy difficulty, as it does put a focus on efficiency, optimal play, and the time/resource management is tight. Making the game stressful, a bit punishing, and difficult that those expecting a casual experience may struggle through or bounce off of.

So yeah, all in all, Potionomics is worth it. Just don’t let the game fool you into thinking this will be a chill and casual experience. This game may exude a casual vibe through its visuals, but the gameplay is not.