Even though I don’t use it at all in my day to day life, every so often a little entrepreneurial spirit comes to the forefront. Perhaps it comes from my late grandfather, who was a skilled jewelry salesman, or my mother who every so often will bring up a business idea that we don’t actually do but like to talk about. Either way, I like having a stable day job too much to seriously think about that, but there is a part of me that thinks “what if I owned a store?” That’s what makes exploring this idea so much fun in video games, and something that Potionomics does particularly well.

Potionomics is set on the island of Rafta, where a burgeoning community of heroes and people supplying those heroes is still in its relative infancy. Your character, Sylvia, inherits a rundown potion shop from her uncle, but quickly finds out that her uncle also left behind a significant debt, one that needs to be paid off quickly. The way to do that? A series of potion-making competitions which has increasingly large prizes, which happen every ten days. So the gameplay is divided into the first nine days, where Sylvia runs the shop, gets ingredients and improves her potion-making equipment while also making as high quality of potions as possible before the tenth day, which is dedicated to the competition.

The gameplay loop of this is really engaging. First, you need to get ingredients, which you can get from sending adventurers you know off on expeditions or through stores, and the number of ways you can get these ingredients increases as the game progresses. For example, the expeditions might be relatively cheap, but you can give adventurers some of your potions to increase their chances of getting further and bringing back more loot. This leads to a fun decision making experience, where you have to consider if it would make more sense to sell a potion and get the gold to buy stuff or to have your adventurers. Each adventurer also has levels that go up the more you send them out, which make them get further on their own. I often found myself with a limited amount of money and several ways to spend it, and having to mentally consider what made the most sense, which felt rewarding when something went my way.

Once you get ingredients you make potions, which are based off of recipes you gain more of as the game progresses. Each ingredient you get has a certain amount of magimins, which is the basic magical power used to make an item stronger, and these are divided into five separate categories that you have to balance to make each item. So potions aren’t about specific exact ingredients but making the ratios match up to what the potion is while also trying to maximize your magimin count to make stronger potions. I found this to be really engaging and probably my favorite part of the game, there was something almost addicting about figuring out the exact perfect combination of ingredients to make the best potion you could. Often at the start of the ten day cycle I found myself wondering how I would ever make potions good enough for the competitions, but feeling satisfied once I got to the competitions and had improved my ingredients, cauldron setup, and skills enough to get through one more competition.

The last part of the gameplay loop is selling these potions, which is done by a card based system where you have to balance your customer’s patience, interest, and Sylvia’s rising stress to try and haggle the prices as high as possible. Throughout the game you get more cards for this by befriending (and potentially romancing) characters around the island, with the conceit that as Sylvia talks to them she figures out more selling strategies. This system was fun to me but I never felt like the strategies were as deep as they could be. That said, I only maxed out one character to get all her cards, so maybe I missed some of that. All of this happens on a time based system where you get six time slots a day which also get used up by going to town to shop and two slots get used if you open up the shop, so I felt like I constantly didn’t have enough time. It was stressful in a fun way, but I spent more time with my potions than the characters, which was a shame because they’re really well designed and fun. I ended up romancing Saffron, a faun carpenter with a past, but I really liked the variety of characters.

The characters and world are really fun and one of the big draws beyond the gameplay. I really enjoyed wondering who I would run into next or getting to spend more time with the characters, to the point where I’m considering trying out the game on its new cozy difficulty so I can spend this time. This new version also adds voiceover which is a welcome addition I can’t imagine not having. All the voice talent does a really good job but I especially liked Sylvia’s voice actor. It’s a nice touch to add for the game’s console port (while also adding it back for PC players).

My biggest gripe and what kept me from playing for a while is that the Switch performance isn’t what I’d like. I’m guessing what’s causing this is the 3D animations, which look really great, but there’s a number of times textures pop in. The real issue is with loading, where there are constant loading screens in between things. I don’t usually mind some loading screens but this is a menu based game where you are constantly switching between these menus, which makes having a loading screen between each frustrating. For example, your potion shop has both a main floor and a basement you can move some items around in, but you have to have a separate loading screen to change between these. It’s the little things that add unpleasant friction to an already pleasant game. I’m not sure if they’d need to eschew the 3D animations to avoid this but whether you’d prefer the 3D animations or a more seamless experience is up to you.

Ultimately, Potionomics is a really rewarding and engaging shop simulator with fun characters and an addictive gameplay loop. While I have some misgivings at how the game runs on Switch, this is a very worthy addition to shop running games, and I can see myself returning to Potionomics, if only to hang out with these characters and brew some more potions.