Potion permits will push you to rock bottom. The town of Moonbury needs a chemist. Fresh out of the capital, you are sent to treat the mayor’s daughter who died of a mysterious illness. However, Moonberry residents don’t have a great track record with chemists, and that becomes clear as the story unfolds.
Open a clinic next to your house, diagnose patients there, and then go out in the wilderness to find ingredients. In your home you have a huge cauldron that you use to brew potions. Each item you collect in the wild has an assigned element and shape. To create a potion, the ingredients must be combined into a larger shape. There is a limit to the number of items you can use, but upgrading your cauldron will unlock more items, which will come in handy as the game progresses. Required to create more complex tonics.
Moonberry residents are open to making friends, despite their reservations. Talking to a character and gifting Moon her cloves will increase the relationship meter and make certain characters available for romance. However, the romance options themselves are very limited. As seen in similar games, there is no marriage option, just dating.
The procedure for potion permits can be a bit repetitive. Diagnose a patient, create a potion, cure the patient, rinse and repeat. Characters often impose fetch quests on you in order to advance their relationship with you, and after a while this all feels the same.
Unfortunately, the game has many bugs. Characters come and go while you talk to them. During fast travel, the entire screen may go black and your character may pop up in another part of the map. It’s this kind of thing that really prevents the Potion Permit from reaching its potential, and its attractive visuals can only counter this.