Official Review Nintendo Switch

Potion Permit (Nintendo Switch)
Official GBAtemp Review

Name: Potion Permit
Item: Potion Permit
Rating: 8
Author: RyRyIV

Product Information:

Release Date (NA): September 22, 2022
Release Date (EU): September 22, 2022
Release Date (JP): September 22, 2022
Publisher: PQube
Developer: MassHive Media
Genres: Role-playing life sim
Also For: Computer, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S

Game Features:

Single player

Local Multiplayer

Online Multiplayer

Co-operative

Today for review, we’re brewing up some potions and getting our relaxation on in Potion Permit!

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Farming sims are all the rage these days, as evidenced by last month's Nintendo’s Direct featuring four separate ones being announced in the same event. As someone who’s sank countless hours into various Harvest Moon titles, as well as the modern farming sim darling Stardew Valley, I completely understand why; these titles are relaxing beyond all belief, allowing you to escape the stress and humdrum of real life, into a simpler world with tasks to occupy you, new friends to meet, and a humble little community to explore. Today we’re looking at Potion Permit, the latest slice-of-life RPG on the scene that swaps out farmland and crops for a potion cauldron and chemistry set. How does this twist on a familiar, and popular, genre hold up? Read on, and let’s take a look!

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Like most of these slice of life simulation games, the story tends to be rather basic, not placing you in the shoes of some chosen one, bent on saving the entire world. Rather, the story tends to focus on simply living in a community, making friends, starting a family, and honing the skills of your vocation. This is the exact route that Potion Permit takes. You begin the game as a chemist traveling to the town of Moonbury, having just taken the role of the town’s primary chemist. From here, you work to cure the various ailments that the townsfolk will come down with, gather resources and ingredients for your various potions, forge relationships, and work to not only make the town a better place, but to rebuild the trust Moonbury has lost in any chemists. As opposed to most life-simulation games that feature the humble community welcoming their new addition with open arms, the residents of Moonbury are much more reserved, taking a bit longer to trust the new chemist in town, with some getting downright hostile at first impression. However, once you start doing odd jobs for folks, improving the town, and making remedies for the various ailments that pop up, the villagers can quickly begin to change their tune about you. From here it’s standard life-sim fare; talk to residents daily and give them specific gift items to make their friendship meter go up, do side quests relating to each character, and eventually the entire town will adore you as a model citizen of the community. There’s even a limited romance option available, allowing you to court a handful of bachelors or bachelorettes in town; though as of this writing, that mechanic doesn’t extend past the “dating” stage. It’s as tedious and grindy as you’re used to from this type of game, but it’s also rewarding and familiar, a theme that could really sum up the entirety of Potion Permit.

Whether you’re diagnosing a resident's illness, crafting a potion, or completing part time work to earn some extra money, minigames are one of the primary gameplay elements throughout Potion Permit. Most of these minigames are rather simple, being either short memory tests or rhythm-like “press each button in sequence at the right time” tests. These are simple and engaging little side objectives, that help make knowledge and gold feel earned; with the diagnostic section, specifically, a meter signifies how easily you’re able to diagnose the villager’s illness. The better you do at the minigame, the higher you fill the gauge, and the better you’re able to treat your patient. Potion crafting has its own specific minigame, which requires you to fill out a puzzle with specifically shaped pieces that you can get from harvestable natural resources. You have a limited number of pieces to fill out the entire puzzle, some of which are significantly more difficult than others, and require some thinking and extra hunting. The minigames are a decent addition, and I like that they offer something proactive to do in these processes to make doing a job, diagnosing a patient, or crafting a potion feel more rewarding and “earned.” At the absolute least, it’s better than the game just giving you everything just for showing up.

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As this game moves the genre away from the farming gameplay that tends to monopolize the genre, hunting and gathering becomes the primary way for getting resources. Each potion you need to craft requires specific types of resources of various attributes, with each resource offering a differently shaped piece of the puzzle minigame that is potioncraft. Because of this, resource collection in the various wilds just outside of Moonbury. Here the gameplay moves from minigames to the more traditional hacking and slashing, with each item you need having its own health bar that must be depleted before you can pick it up. Some of the items you’ll need to collect come from living creatures, many of which will fight back. You harvest each resource with a specific tool, of which you have three; the axe, the scythe, and the hammer. Scythes are used for harvesting plants, hammers for shattering stones, and the axe for chopping down trees. Some of the creatures you’ll harvest from can be fought with any of the tools, while others will require a specific one to break through their defenses. These tools can be upgraded to do more damage, and make the harvesting process go quicker. Beyond potioncraft, the wood and rock you collect can be used for those upgrades, home and clinic upgrades, and building a connection to previously inaccessible areas of the map. It’s a natural and pretty reasonable way of progressing to higher level areas that doesn’t feel quite as contrived as some other games, but it does still feel very grindy; you need a lot of wood and stone to both spend on upgrades and building land connections, so I found myself spending more time in the woods grinding up my resources, rather than in town building relationships and raising the trust level.

There’s admittedly a couple of performance issues I’ve run into on the Switch version I’ve been playing for this review, mostly in the form of some lag when harvesting resources or running about town, and one instance of a glitch where after fast traveling I was caught beyond the boundaries of the town, and had to restart my game and lose the day’s progress. But that’s the extent of the issues I’ve had while playing Potion Permit. It’s a fun and relatively fresh take on the popular genre that offers just as much life sim fun as those that came before it, with a bit of a fantasy twist to give it its own flavor. In an ideal world, I’d love to see this game supported with consistent content updates to keep the gem polished and relevant for years to come. But even as is, it’s well worth the price of admission, and should offer plenty of hours of fun on its own.

Verdict

What We Liked ...

Fun take on a familiar format
Minigames help make more menial tasks feel more immersive and enjoyable
Relaxing setting and music

What We Didn't Like ...

Minor performance hiccups on Switch
A bit cutscene heavy

Gameplay

Potion Permit isn't breaking any new ground on the gameplay department, but it's well tuned for optimal enjoyment.

Presentation

Despite some very minor performance hiccups, the graphics and soundtrack offer a relaxing setting to lose yourself in.

Lasting Appeal

There's plenty to keep even the most dedicated life sim fans happy, even if some of it is a bit grindy.

out of 10

Overall

Potion Permit is a fun new game cut from familiar cloth. It offers a new and relatively unique spin on the popular farming and life simulator formula, and is a game I can see myself coming back to regularly for months, and maybe even years, to come.

Reactions: Ericzander, hippy dave, Prans and 4 others

Those aren't Performance hiccups, they're features.

Thanks for bringing this game to my attention! Definitely going to buy it ASAP

A Aheago
Oct 9, 2022

I love this game, but I have a fear that the devs are looking to use the sims model for the game for any and all content updates

There are already a ton of DLC packs available with more to come

Still a fun game though. Just a bit worrisome for future content potential

Tanked my save file with a fat-thumb moment when starting up. Hit the "go" button immediately followed by the "delete" button, and poof, save file gone in an instant.

Also, didn't like the game much. Felt shallow, grindy... Even using cheats to accelerate the grind, speedhacks to make the game run faster, it just... dragged. It wasn't what I was hoping for. Mini-games were very kid-level and pointless.

Bought it for steam on release (was waiting for it's release for a long time).
I'm a huge farm sim fan and really wanted to enjoy this game, sadly I wound up finding it 'boring' after a while. Levelling up affection with villagers and extremely slow. The crafting and the healing aspect are fun, but more often than not I end up wasting time. I'll give it another try in a couple months.

Performance wise, it runs flawlessly on the steam deck.

Reactions: RyRyIV

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