Alchemist: The Potion Monger
Like the title suggests, Alchemist: The Potion Monger is a simulation game centered around preparing alchemical potions. You gather ingredients from the environment and use them to craft potions. These potions are further used to complete quests or fulfill NPC contracts, but you can also sell them in your shop in town for extra coins. With the coins earned, you can buy new recipes, rare ingredients or various tools needed to produce more advanced potions.
The game has pretty much all the mechanics one would look for in this genre, together with a very basic combat mechanic (just a light attack) and an equally basic farming mechanic (you plant the seeds once and gather them indefinitely every day afterward). Currently, there is no relationship system with the NPCs and all the ingredients are available at any time because there is no seasonal cycle implemented (although a few of them appear only at night).
On the other hand, the whole layer of crafting alchemical potions is rather complex, which is expected from this kind of game. Each of the four alchemical elements (earth, water, fire, wind) consists of 16 aspects (attributes). All the ingredients, as well as potion recipes, have a specific subset of these aspects. To craft a potion, you will need to use those ingredients whose attributes match the ones required by the portion. However, this is not as easy as it sounds, as the ingredients often have to go through a chain of several alchemical transformations to change their aspects into the ones needed. This is done with the help of several tools that can either morph one aspect into another based on the tiers or elements they belong to or apply other sorts of transformations on the ingredient, such as removing the weakest / strongest aspect or entirely swapping it with the one corresponding to the opposite element.
Your main item to use will be the Philosopher’s Stone, which shows the ingredients the player could use to craft a potion, as well as the tools required for processing those ingredients. While you are not obliged to craft the recipe as indicated by the Philosopher’s Stone, nor does it show all possible combinations (there would be way too many possibilities), this is a real help in simplifying the process, especially until the player learns the ropes. The Philosopher’s Stone acts only as a hint, as it provides neither the full solution nor all the steps that a certain ingredient needs to go through to reach the goal attribute. The actual puzzle and the core of the gameplay is figuring out the transformation sequence by yourself, which tools to use on which ingredients and in what order to apply them. While it takes some time to find a solution (and, in some cases, some trial and error too), they are always logical – which is one of the aspects I like most about this game.
Several other quality-of-life features are aimed at increasing the enjoyment of the game. Portals can help you quickly navigate various areas of the world. The locations of the ingredients are saved on the map (and visible at all times) after you gather them once from that zone. There are several furniture items (aside from chests) that can hold ingredients and they add a really stylish touch to your cozy alchemist hut. There is also the feature of saving the solution of a potion to recreate it later with one click without having to go through the whole process again (as long as you have the required ingredients in the inventory). Crafting using such a saved recipe automatically uses the ingredients available in all storages of the house, removing the annoying requirement to transfer them to your inventory beforehand. A tool that can create dyes also exists, allowing you to change the colors of your house walls for example. And you can adopt several pets that will help you identify the aspects of a certain ingredient (by default you know only the element they belong to).
Alchemist: The Potion Monger is currently in Early Access but it’s fully playable, with around 15 hours of content (quests and achievements), although it can surely be played for much longer than that. The full version will expand the current universe with new side quests, potion types, NPCs, a house expansion and obviously new ingredients.