Potion Permit review – ye olde pharmacy simulator

metro.co.uk:

Ultra violence and punishing difficulty are nowhere to be found in this charming, bucolic adventure where you play as a JRPG chemist.

For fans of cottagecore and tweeness, the cosy genre, as typified by Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing, is like coming home. Eschewing violence, bloodshed, and horror – as well as typical action elements like driving, flying, and sports – cosy games instead tend to feature farming, friendship, and purely cosmetic home decoration. It’s a genre where the world is a small welcoming village, and nobody has surface-to-air missiles.

That’s just the sort of place you’ll find in Potion Permit. Its village of Moonbury is more or less what you’d expect from the genre: an isometric cute-fest that includes both people’s houses and businesses. As such, you play a chemist sent from the capital city to help heal the mayor’s daughter, whose illness has baffled the local herbalist.

But there’s a problem. The people of Moonbury have had a bad experience with a big city chemist in the past, and as well as your job healing the sick and injured you’ll also need to work to persuade residents that you’re not some sort of charlatan sent to fleece them of their cash and livelihoods. To that end you’ll be brewing potions but also going out of your way to win friends.

Rather prosaically, you do that by talking to villagers, which increments their friendship bar by a small amount. You can also give them a present, but there’s only one thing you can give to absolutely everybody, and you can only give it once to each resident, so conversation is your most effective tool in talking the town round to your perspective. Raise their friendship bars enough and you’ll trigger a Stardew Valley heart event-style cut scene.

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