Potion Permit 2022 Hub

MY IMPRESSIONS

Even though Potion Permit looks as cute as similar games like “Star Dew Valley” or “Harvest Moon”, there are a couple of things that don’t push it up to the same level.

First of all, I like the idea of not being a Farmer, but a chemist that brews potions to help the town’s citizen. The developers were unfortunately not ambitious and courageous enough to make a true competition of mentioned above games. Instead, they kept content to a minimum and left it with that: – Map is ridiculously small and the two new areas that can be opened up with easy to follow quests are not even a challenge and quite uninspired and bland:
– Even though the town has a lot of citizens, it does not live the way you would hope. Try following around one citizen and you will see, that the conversations this citizen has with other citizens is one or two sentences they repeat over and over as long as they have the interaction with someone else. And this could be a couple of ingame hours.
– Upgrading the citizen’s friendship level towards you as a player is very uninspired. While in other games, it’s helpful to figure out a citizen’s gift preferences, which contributes to diving deeper into their personality, you just give them a generic gift package, which you receive from healing others or successfully complete a quest. Fair enough, there are friendship quests in between, but most of them are another grind experience, where you have to chop or hunt a certain amount of time to get X items to return somewhere.
– Upgrading tools and the house is just a massive grind of chopping wood and hitting rocks. All in all, you will spend more time collecting wood and stone for upgrades than collecting ingredients and brewing potions, which just doesn’t make sense in a game that’s supposed to be all about potions.
– The game tried a bit too hard to distance itself from farming. It would have been obvious to be able to plant some herbs in a little garden. Again, another opportunity missed…

It was good until it lasted but that wasn’t very long. One good thing is that it is not so expensive but Stardew Valley is still cheaper with more content. So to be brutally honest, I rather go play Stardew Valley again…