This review is only playing the demo and only a few months after release which since it appears to be indie means this should change a lot.

Using a controller I found the naming aspect annoyingly old school, my dogs name never came up once despite me giving him a cheeky name, I never introduced him to anyone. These are minor issues. Diagonal running which is usually quite efficient and given the layout of the house is basically required often times snags on air and you run at 25-50% normal speed until you straighten up or get past whatever 'air' you're running against. The fast travel really should have been explained more than just "Oh you finally clicked this thing?", combat is a bit odd early on, but most odd is the overwhelming fixation of everyone except the guy who called you there absolutely hating you and their need for you to prove yourself. Is everyone an egomaniac? Yet the moment I intend to stay you get a proper 'stranger's greeting', actually giving a name, some being more openly warm. It's just odd.

The minigames were pretty fun, combat is nothing to write home about for this genre but was simple enough.

I can't say I intend to purchase this, but maybe that will change with time.

The best pixel art game i've ever seen. Gorgeous.

I started playing casually and got hooked instantly by the ambience and story.. On the other hand, i felt that i had to force myself to finish the game due to the repetitive and fast-becoming boring mini games.

Really worth trying.

I remember being really excited about this game once I first saw the trailer. It is exactly what I was looking for, something cosy but different from all of the farming sims I just couldn't get into.

Once the game came out it was already overshadowed by so many bad reviews, because it just had way too many bugs and the performance was overall problematic for such a visually "simple" game.

Now, all this didn't stop be from picking it up for the Switch and I did really enjoy myself for the first few hours. However, it slowly turned into a chore rather than something I play for fun. I am someone who just hates to leave games unfinished once I started them and didn't hate them. This game was just good enough for me to care about finishing it, but doing that, meaning getting to the credits, is just so exhausting.

Positives? The visuals and animations are so cute and beautiful, the soundtrack is simple but works and the characters have charming designs and SOME interesting storylines. But that's about it. The gameplay is pretty bland after a few hours, it doesn't evolve enough and isn't challenging enough whatsoever. Once I was ~20 hours in I really just wanted to get out of this town for good, but in order to finish the game you need to make the town love you. Let me tell you, I skipped through so many character events and it took me 2 weeks alone to get them all to a high enough friendship. I can't really say if the character stories are well written, because at the point I got to them I already didn't care anymore. There also is a "dating" option for some of the towns people, but no marriage and the "dates" are always the same thing, it just seems like an afterthought to please gamers who want romance in these kind of life simulation games. It's not worth it.

This game had a lot of potential and while I would not say it is a terrible game and nobody should ever pick it up, I think people who are really into SLOW gameplay and like having a set routine could like this a lot more than me. Also if you really want to spend hours and hours on getting to know these characters, you'll get that.

I do not necessarily regret my time on this game, I just wish it would have been shorter.

I hate how the self-evidently grindy mechanics are also totally unashamed of the fact that they're wasting your time. Allowing you to brew a potion that skips the inane diagnosis minigames and lets you get straight to brewing a second potion is such a slap in the face. Why even have the minigames in the first place? Does my dude still not know how to diagnose bruises after the tenth time? The core loop is so unrewarding, an uphill climb that gates you in a million different ways, not with difficulty but with sheer unwillingness to concede any notion that you're mastering the game's systems or putting them in dialogue. I couldn't even get my dumb gay boyfriend to give me a discount at the furniture store. By the time I had cleared all of the plot content and found myself unable to get to the ending, the flags for which remain a mystery to the internet at large, I realized that I was only attempting to finish the game out of spite and let myself be free. Beautiful sprite work, sure; behold a town full of pretty dolls waiting to suck your blood as soon as you let them.

There’s a lot to enjoy about potion permit, but it wears on you pretty quickly.

At first, crafting new potions and discovering more of the island are super fun and exciting, just as developing relationships with the residents and upgrading the town are. You are eager to try and mend the strained relationship between moonbury and chemists from an accident that happened before your time, and that’s exciting!

But before too long, you enter the soul crushing farming in this game. You get stuck in a cycle of go out, farm as much as you can in the short day cycles, talk to as many people and do as many quests as you can, and repeat. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t really go beyond this. It is very linear in progression and gameplay, whereas a game it gets compared to a lot, stardew valley, there are seemingly endless possibilities on what you want to accomplish.

There’s a ton of potential here, and I did have a good time, I just have a sour spot for how the mid to late game left me feeling, with no true good ending for all my hard work.

An alchemy-themed synthesis of Stardew Valley and the Atelier series. The idea has a lot of promise, and the pixel art is lovely, but everything else feels less substantial than its parent influences.

It has Stardew's stupid save system that only lets you save by going to bed, but for what reason? Probably to get people to mention Stardew in their reviews. An alchemist's life is much less rigidly scheduled than a farmer's, apparently. There's no weather, no seasons, no unique days of the year, no reason that anything needs to be done on a particular day, and no limit to your total number of days. Your only deadlines are when someone falls ill, but I've always been able to fix that before 7 AM on the day it happens. Apparently there aren't really any consequences to missing a treatment deadline, either: there are achievements for failing to cure one, and then ten, separate patients.

The game's story is about winning the trust of the villagers by repairing alchemy-related environmental damage around your island. The story rolls to a halt with only a little fanfare (a party scene at the local tavern) once you do.

Man, I really, really wanted to like this game, given the fact that I love these type of cozy games but it's just not hitting it for me. The pixel art is good and I can tell there's alot of love put into it but it's just kind of boring. There's potential in the story but never did I actually felt truly compelled by what was happening. The characters also felt extremely bland and the game encourages you to grind friendship with them but there's no motivation to do so when they're just very one dimensional. Not to mention the main attraction of this game, the alchemy, is just... Meh? It's fun for maybe the first few times but it gets old so fast. Treating patients consists of really repetitive minigames that are just a pain to get through. Just an overall disappointment.

Cute Stardew Valley-esque game. I had fun with it, but it's not as long or as fleshed-out as Stardew.

I was intrigued by the concept of the game, where villagers will periodically get sick and you have to heal them with a potion before they'll reappear in the town. In execution, though, it's pretty boring. You have several days to heal patients, but you'll almost always have the ingredients on-hand to heal them immediately, and even if you don't there isn't much of a consequence. I found myself wishing that the villagers would get sick more often or the stakes for failure were a bit higher, so that healing would involve some interesting strategy rather than becoming a chore that wastes a few hours every morning.

Overall, it's a cute, chill game that I had a good time playing. I just wish it was a little different.

It's a cute management game and despite having combat, I'd call it cozy as the combat is a simple one. I enjoyed both the mini games while healing the town's people and the puzzle when making potions, trying to figure out how best to use the ingredients. You get a dog companion that is more than just a cute addition and can help you out with small things. I did enjoy the characters their stories, I befriended all of the townies but finished the romance scenario only for one (Reyner), after the main cutscenes you can take them on a date any time, which is a cute addition. With befriending the people of the town you get to repair parts of it. In my playthrough, I have finished all the repairs and while I could continue the game, I didn't feel it would be as rewarding with not much more content apart from grinding.

My playthrough with the main story plus the extra befriending of the townies took 25 hours.

Potion Permit joins a growing list of relaxing and enjoyable experiences but a lack of variety prevents it from being as memorable as the likes of Stardew Valley.

Synopsis
The game follows the protagonist as they work to earn the trust of the NPC villagers by treating ailments using potions and helping them with various relationship quests. You must collect your own ingredients or purchase them and make a variety of potions to treat the villagers when they become sick.

Gameplay - ★★★
Gameplay consists of harvesting ingredients in the wilderness, brewing potions to sell or use when NPCs are sick, treating sick NPCs, talking to townspeople to make them like you more, and doing quests for the NPCs to unlock higher levels of friendship and, of course, new features for the town and your house.

I think that the concept of finding out what ails the villagers and applying the proper treatment is a very promising setup, but unfortunately, I feel like it fell flat because the "diagnosis" portion of the treatment process is really boring and has nothing to do with reality. To diagnose a problem you just complete a short mini-game consisting of a directional memory challenge, a DDR-style input game, or a really straightforward "dodge incoming obstacles" game. At first, these were fine but as I continued playing they really just became something annoying that I had to do before actually applying the proper treatment because they had absolutely nothing to do with the particular ailment and they weren't particularly fun.

Once you have diagnosed the problem you have to go brew the correct potion for the ailment, or you can immediately apply it if you already have it on hand. Potion brewing is done by placing what could be described as Tetris-block-style shapes on an outline, filling it up entirely. Different ingredients have different shapes and different potions have different outlines for you to fill in. I thought this was a cool take on this concept and my only complaint here is that the blocks could not be rotated. I understand that the developers wanted to have more ingredients and by not allowing the ingredients to be rotated you have 4 different ingredients that are uniquely useful, instead of one that can just be used in 4 areas. But because the shapes look like Tetris blocks I found myself constantly having the desire to rotate them.

The major problem with this game is that collecting ingredients for potions is really boring. You have three tools that you use to collect materials from trees, rocks, plants, or monsters. They all take multiple hits to harvest and you cannot hold the button down to hit them. You can very easily spend an entire in-game day doing nothing but harvesting materials. That's probably about 30-45 real minutes doing nothing but smacking inanimate objects and the occasional enemy that barely poses a threat. Speaking of, the enemies are basically a joke. In the first two areas, it's not even worth your time to avoid their attacks. They are so weak that you're better off just taking the hit because you have a limited amount of time in the day and it's not worth spending it trying to dodge attacks. In later areas the enemies become more difficult and you do actually have to pay attention, but the first couple areas basically teach you to not care about combat, so by the time you have to actually pay attention it's not something that you really want to do at that point.

New areas and tool upgrades are acquired using money, wood, and stone. New areas have new materials and the tool upgrades make your items more powerful, requiring fewer swings to dispatch your targets. This is all very standard, but the problem is that the only way to make money at anything but a snail's pace is to brew potions. And brewing potions requires ingredients. So the best way to make money for necessary upgrades is by doing monotonous collection all the time.

The relationship quests are what really kept me going in the game. I'm honestly not sure why, because I don't normally care much about NPCs in games, but I found myself wanting to help them out with what they needed. There were several characters that I genuinely wanted to watch grow and learn and this is what kept me going for most of the game.

Story - ★★
The mayor asks your character, a Chemist, to come to town to help heal his daughter from an ailment that the local doctor can't figure out. You come and cure it immediately and so he asks you to stay. The problem is that no one trusts you because the last time there was a chemist on their little island, he royally fucked up, destroying the environment and causing several of their native plants and animals to go extinct. Your job is to not only help the townspeople but also find out what went wrong and fix the errors of the previous chemist.
This is a good set up but in the end mostly just boils down to completing more quests to brew potions to fix the damage. You will discover scrolls as you explore written by the previous chemist but none of it is particularly interesting. But even if I don't necessarily care about the how or why, I do like the goal of restoring a natural landscape to its former glory.

Characters - ★★★★
There are too many characters to discuss in detail but they all feel very unique and fleshed out. It would have been nice to see more dialogue options available for the "talk to them once a day" voice lines, but there are a large number of cutscenes involving each character that give you very good insight into their lives and personalities. Every time you speak to a character they like you a bit more, up to a max. Once you hit that max you have to do a relationship quest to unlock the next level of friendship. These relationship quests are very well done and often are unexpected in how they play out. For example, to unlock a new friendship level for character A you may sometimes have to talk to character B who asks you to work with character C to do something nice for character A. The quests are not always just "give me this thing, ok now I like you more" and they aren't always materialistic either. I thought both of those aspects were really good at making the whole process feel more natural and also giving the town a very "community" vibe. A place where these people live and know one another while you're new in town and getting to know them all.

Art - ★★★★
The pixel art is wonderful. Bright and colorful areas with lots of detail. Character sprites move smoothly and are unique. Their outfits, movement, and idle animations all help to tell a story of their personality. The wilderness areas look very nice, even if there isn't a ton to do in them, and enemy design is fun if a bit derivative in some cases. I was particularly impressed in a snowy area when the snow on the trees fell off realistically when the tree was chopped down and hit the ground.

Music ★★★
There were not very many different tracks that I noticed but I really enjoyed the music for one of the wilderness areas. It is a shame that the other areas did not have the same care.

In summary, Potion Permit is a fun game and one that I would recommend that any "cozy gamer" play. But go into it knowing that you're playing a relationship-building game with some potion-making elements and be prepared for a lot of chopping.

Played on Amazon Luna as a monthly free game for Amazon Prime members. I ran out of time to play it while it was free and didn't want to sub just to finish it. If I subscribe to Luna again I'll finish it.