Potion Permit - Taking a dash of Stardew Valley, and brewing up something just as good! (PS4/PS5/PC/XBX/XB1)
Stardew Valley was such a fantastic game, but it could only hold one’s attention for so long. When I finally stopped playing it due to the inevitability of boredom, I hoped for another simulation game to come along and hit all the right notes needed to fill that Stardew Valley-shaped hole in my heart. Enter Potion Permit, a simulation game that seemed to take inspiration from Stardew Valley. However, the developers opted to make the game about being an apothecary instead of a farmer. The graphics, the gameplay, and the music all helped make the game feel like a spiritual successor to Stardew Valley and goes even further than Stardew Valley did, with quality of life updates that make the game a blast to play!
As an apothecary, your main goal in this game is to help keep the citizens of the town of Stonebury happy and healthy, but you can’t do that without proper materials. Thankfully, you have access to several areas with decent amounts of resources. These resource-abundant locales lead Potion Permit into its first style of gameplay: Foraging! While it is relatively simple, the foraging is still captivating as you don’t have enough stamina in one in-game day to harvest everything you see. It provides a pleasant level of player agency as you can choose to focus on certain types of resources or harvest as you please.
The second half of this solid gameplay loop is the incredibly satisfying process of curing the townsfolk! When someone ends up in your clinic, you go through a simple minigame to diagnose their ailments and determine the medicine you need. Most of Potion Permit's depth occurs here, as there are no set recipes for anything you can brew. Instead, brewing works like a jigsaw puzzle, as recipes are outlines that need to be filled in with ingredients to brew the medicine. Each resource you can harvest has an element and a shape that can fit into the recipe outline. This allows the player to carefully consider what ingredients they want to use for the recipe and lets them conserve resources for more complicated recipes that restrict the type of elements that one can use for them.
Of course, the game would get rather dull if the patients you cured were just nameless people, but Potion Permit takes some influence from Stardew Valley and features a ton of townsfolk to get to know! Every town member is memorable, as they all have great personalities, traits, and daily schedules! The history of the town also makes your character’s relationship with the citizens intriguing, as most people refuse to immediately trust you due to incidents that occurred in the past with other apothecaries. It provides a nice twist and helps you build a connection with these characters as they begin to trust you more and more, helping the town of Stonebury feel a little nicer every day!
The presentation of Potion Permit provides a nice, cozy atmosphere as well! The soft flutes and string instruments used in the OST punctuates the calmness and peacefulness of the small island town, and the mildly muted yet variable colors of the landscapes you traverse craft a warm, cozy feeling for the player! The atmosphere and presentation even provide a benefit to gameplay, as it makes the alert that goes off when someone gets sick all the more alarming. The game also goes with tried-and-true pixelated 2-D graphics that help add to its charm. While these graphics make it seem similar to Stardew Valley, Potion Permit's visuals are more detailed than in Stardew Valley and move very smoothly while on screen! It feels more like a graphical remaster of a DS game than anything else.
All in all, I would give Potion Permit a 9/10, and I highly recommend it!