I put the daisies, the silver nuggets, and the bear’s severed paws into this boiling water. drink up.
Not to mention the recent influx of games that put the player in a rural setting and have to run a business while getting along with the locals. That business is usually a farm. With a potion permit, you don’t have to plant and water a field of turnips in the hope that one day you’ll have a bountiful blueberry harvest, but it’s important to keep them out of the same box as games like Stardew Valley. Both games position you as a newcomer to a small town and involve solving the problems of the townspeople while earning money, and both aspects of befriending various characters around you. The DNA shared between the two is inevitable and not a bad thing in and of itself. The important thing is that it is different. Potion Permit contains some smart decisions and mechanics, but it also has some unfortunate flaws that are hard to ignore.
In Potion Permit, you play as a chemist who works for the World Medical Association and is sent to the town of Moonberry to help treat the mayor’s sick daughter. The people of Moonberry distrust chemists due to an incident that destroyed the island’s ecosystem many years ago, so by opening a clinic to treat citizens if they fall ill. , should earn their trust. Gameplay is pretty standard for the genre. You can venture out into the wilderness to gather plants, metals, and animal products that can be used to create medicinal potions. Crafting potions takes the form of a puzzle, in which a shape made of interconnected squares must be filled with ingredients, each ingredient being represented by a different shape. Some recipes may limit the elements that can be used as ingredients, limiting them to a certain amount per brew. Patients can tell you which parts of their body feel sick. Play mini-games to dig deeper and diagnose problems. The mini-games associated with this are pretty boring overall, but thankfully they’re short and should only be run when you’re first diagnosing a new type of condition. Your trust in you will grow, and Moonberry people will be more receptive to your presence.
What I find most disappointing about Potion Permit is that the genre’s traditional gifting system is horribly watered down. In normal games like this, you can give any item to any of her NPCs to build a relationship with them. It’s up to you to figure out what the person likes to receive and what they absolutely dislike. With potion permits, no guesswork is required. Instead, everyone in Moonberry universally loves, Moon has one item he can gift as a gift called Cloves. This makes it a little easier to build relationships more quickly, but has the side effect of making the whole thing feel shallow. Other games should copy as much as they can. In a game like Stardew Valley, you’re constantly wandering around town hoping to stumble upon a scene at random. requirement. Potion Permit solves this problem by providing a bulletin board that points you in the right direction and gives you the correct time slot. Another big improvement is that you can command your dog to guide you to any character around town. This saves you having to meticulously memorize the weekly schedule of all her NPCs. Both of these are great mechanics and I would like to see more, but sadly the specter of the gift system these mechanics were meant to support weighs too much on the whole package, leaving you with as much as you need I really don’t feel it makes any difference.
Even more surprising to me were the numerous technical issues encountered while using Potion Permit. Every few minutes, the whole game would hang for a second as if it was about to crash, always recovering quickly, but occasionally to see the time freeze took me a bit away from the experience. One of the most frustrating bugs was when one of the journal tabs counted one unread entry too many. So the unread icon remained on that tab for most of my playthrough and I couldn’t retrieve it. remove. At one point the game disabled his two fast travel points in town for no reason. I had to re-enable it manually. Otherwise the game would throw an error every time I tried to use them. The cutscene also loads awkwardly, briefly flashing an image of what appears to be the outdoor area before fading into a proper cutscene. This was very distracting.
I don’t dislike Potion Permit, but there are plenty of reasons to be disappointed with it.The town of Moonbury is a charming place with lots of diverse and fun characters, and the resource-gathering gameplay loop can take hours and hours. has the usual ability to get you hooked, but it felt like something was just there and didn’t hurt the game world. Itching as well as it may have. Add to that the various technical issues and the inexcusable crime of not allowing me to fall in love with Helene, and I would recommend this game to anyone before turning it to many other options. It’s hard to imagine doing that. Despite working well, the Potion Permit doesn’t do enough to stand out from the crowd.
