Gorgeous deck-building shop sim Potionomics just got a patch that fixes all my problems with it—plus voice acting, and an option to smooch everyone in a single playthrough

pcgamer.com:

I had a ton of fondness for Potionomics when it came out in 2022—as did PC Gamer, apparently, as we gave it an 87 in our Potionomics review. In case you missed this charming gem—it's a shop simulator by Voracious Games about inheriting a bunch of debt and a potions store. The way it handles selling those potions (and competing in competitions) is via deckbuilding—with the protagonist gaining new sales tactics from the people she interacts with, then flogging her wares in Slay the Spire-style battles.

It's a genuinely gorgeous little thing. Everything from its UI, to its character designs, to its animations are designed to give you a lovely little fuzz of belonging, and it helps that its mechanics all slot together satisfyingly, too. Alas, it had a few key problems when I played it that stopped me from finishing my playthrough—problems that are now thoroughly fixed via a major update that dropped yesterday.

First up—being a game where time is a concern, Potionomics had this weird friction where you could end up in an XCOM-style death spiral if you wasted your time in those early days. This made it mechanically engaging, but often meant new players would spend a few hours getting invested before realising they were screwed. Well, now there's difficulty options you can change at any time.

On that time restriction, one thing that always bothered me was how Potionomics ended. Mostly in that it did.It had this Persona-style deadline cutoff date where the credits roll and that's basically it—which would be a fine way to structure things if it was a short game, but I didn't finish my playthrough and I'd sunk about 30 hours into the thing. Well, now there's an endless mode after the story's finished, so you can tie off all your little romance arcs.

Speaking of, it was that long playtime—a good thing under any other circumstance—that also frustrated me when it came to the game's romance options. Potionomics is filled with a cast of lovely, well-written characters, but you