Recent reviews by Punnett Claire

Every so often a little-known indie developer comes along with a love letter to a nostalgic game. Undertale, Hollow Knight, Ikenfell... I'd like to see Potionomics in the same class.

This game can be described with with four tags: Alchemy, deckbuilding, dating sim, and capitalism. It feels very much like an updated Recettear, with the same premise-- You inherit a shop and the crushing debt left behind by your now-deceased family member. You have to make increasingly large weekly payments or you'll lose everything, including the game. Along the way, you'll get friends that you send on adventures for rare materials, which lead to more expensive merchandise, bigger and better shelves, and maybe even the eventual triumph over the yoke of capitalism constantly driving us forward.

Potionomics diverges from Recettear in three essential ways. First, everything you sell is a potion (or tonic, cure, or enhancer) that you personally brewed. Crafting is a minigame of combining ingredients with five different colors of magimins (magic vitamins) and either good or bad sense qualities, like a pleasant taste or it being painful to look at. Your choice of cauldron limits you by the total number of ingredients and magimins, and get bonuses for well-balanced potions, which makes brewing interesting from early game all the way until the end. You can buy the ingredients through multiple channels, from a simple shop to adventurers, investments, and even loot boxes, so you can always keep your cauldrons brewing.

Now that you've got potions to sell, we'll set up shop! You put together a deck of 20 haggling cards, which might drive up their interest, brace for their complaints, or apply helpful buffs and debuffs. The customer's patience also acts as your energy resource, so nearly every action lowers how long they're willing to talk to you. The longer a deal goes on, though, the more cards you draw, so you'll wind up with more options. I would compare this gameplay more to the likes of Slay the Spire than Dominion, with an interesting spin on the theme.

You only start with a small selection of cards, though, and the way to get more is through *romance*. Or just friendship, I suppose. As you build relationships with the townspeople, they'll share their haggling tips and inspire some new ones. Each character has a distinct haggling style, helping your deck form an identity-- Do you focus on relieving stress, blocking it from being built up in the first place, or work through it? Are you looking for a slow and steady pace or a bombastic entrance that quickly peters out? Is pandering worth the self-hatred it inflicts? Maybe it's better to just charm them.

And this game has charm in spades. There's a wide array of characters, most of which are romance options. Perhaps you're drawn in by Baptiste's captivating charms, or want to spend the day enjoying the silence with the down-to-earth Saffron. Or if you want someone big, squeezable, and warm, there's the bear-like walrus-man Muktuk, or the neurodivergent Corsac, who feels more at home in the wilds than the unfamiliar city. Or maybe instead of dating you just want to pet some cats, and thankfully, there's *two of them* and they're *pirates* and their theme song is comprised almost entirely of meows. The art, design, and music are all so much more polished than they have any business being for Voracious Games' first game.

One complaint I could see is a lack of endless mode, or even just free time after the story. Every character has four types of hanging out with multiple prompts that show continuity, and I want to see them for my favorites! I want to plant a whole orchard with Saffron, I want to see what the prank war between Salt and Pepper and Quinn leads to, I just wanna hang out with Xid because honestly she's too cool for me! But, if after a couple of dozen hours, my biggest complaint is "I want to spend more time with these people," I think that's a pretty good sign.

I would absolutely recommend it.

First and foremost, it's an amazingly atmospheric game. That's kind of the main draw. There's times when the camera zooms out and Thora is a tiny ant in the scene. Sometimes it's a backdrop, sometimes it's taking in the scale of the world around her, sometimes it's even just to fit some of these massive enemies on the screen. The music is appropriate to the scene, though nothing is exceedingly memorable.

Thora's design is just great. She's stocky, like one would expect a viking warrior to be, her axe has the versimilitude of being a huge, heavy chunk of steel, with slow swings and a heavy executioner's chop that leaves a cracked gash in the ground. She even has a bearskin cloak and deer antlers on her helmet, which is a surprisingly useful aspect; when the camera zooms out so much that she's a speck, the angle of these shapes is helpful in determining facing. Her heavy swing is 8-directional when movement is analog, so it can sometimes be important to know you're facing just right.

Other characters have a great aesthetic in common; they all look like painted sketches. You can see frames where the color extends past the lineart underneath, compared to the environment that has a finished, polished look. While this could just be a practical matter for an indie developer (as it's easier to polish fifteen environments than dozens of frames for one character), it also gives it this kind of a kitschy storybook look.

Which goes into the story. It doesn't have any unique twists, but remains satisfying to uncover. Each time you proceed through an area, you get snippets of story about a location or person in Norse mythology. Each time you defeat a jotun, you get some of Thora's story. Both are spoken in old Norse (I think, I'm not fluent) with translated subtitles. It evokes the feeling of an oral history being spoken. Combined with the storybook look mentioned above, it gives this impression that they're trying to commit an oral history to tapestry, which adds so much to the atmosphere of the game.

Gameplay consists of two types. Most of your time is spent exploring the different environments seeking out runes. When you collect enough (one or two, depending), you're able to challenge that element's jotun (giant). This is where the atmospheric side of things really shines, and mostly consists of Thora wandering around oversized landscapes. My biggest complaint here is that most of the ways you interact with the environment require a heavy swing, which has a long wind-up that feels good if you only have to do it once, but bad if you have to do it a dozen times as part of movement. The blood of Ymir area was particularly bad about this, and many of the environments felt like tedium, as beautiful as they were.

There's a giant for earth, storm, ice, fire, and metal. Each is very unique, and most have a way to use their environment against them (Such as stunning the storm giant or slinging icicles at the ice giant). While your first time might feel an overwhelming endurance slog, there are achievements for kills under 25 seconds, kills without taking damage, and kills without using any god-given powers. Overall, the boss fights are memorable, enjoyable, and a little painful. And if you're itching for more after you finish the game, there's a "boss rush" type mode where you fight superpowered versions of them with all your upgrades unlocked.

Overall, it's a fun way to spend your time, but nothing revolutionary. Well worth playing if you're a fan of the genres, but an easy pass if you're not. I'd give it a 6.5/10.