A young, aspiring individual arrives in a small town and must win over the locals with their personality and skills at the job. It’s a story you might have heard before, though it usually ends with raising chickens and trying to work out how to get the best pumpkin. Sometimes you’ll be making water wheels and just raising the chickens on the side.

Then there’s PQube and MassHive Media’s new title Potion Permit, which takes you off the farm entirely. In this game, people and their health is your concern.

Story

Potion Permit keeps the general framing of a lot of Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley-esque sims, with you arriving fresh off the train in a simple rural town. In this case, you are a freshly-graduated chemist from the Medical Association, trained in curing illness and brewing potions. The similarities story-wise end around that point, however. Potion Permit takes a sharp turn from ‘Everyone is cautious but happy someone is taking over the position.’ reaction that you can normally expect from similar games.

As you appear in Moonbury, you soon realise one thing: Nearly everyone hates you. The town has an apparent deep prejudice against chemists after their last one did an unspecified terrible thing. As such, they’re somewhat unfairly taking it out on you. It will take some time before they’ll even begin to speak to you. It sounds a little dark, but honestly, the initial days of getting flat-out insulted in the street were kind of hilarious in the outright hostility. 

Soon, you are able to ingratiate yourself a little more, when your medical knowledge allows you to cure people that the local witch doctor, a moody Dr. Strange look-alike named Matheo, cannot do anything for. Gradually, people will warm up to you, and you will learn more about their lives.

As you might expect from the genre, Moonbury has a host of interesting characters, some of whom can be romanced. They’re not afraid to make characters a little weird, which can set the experience apart from those with more generally-grounded characters. You have a hooked-handed pirate lady, a grave keeper with imaginary friends, a giant fisherman who speaks in the third person, and a family of buff female blacksmiths to name a few. 

Gameplay

As you might expect, the crux of the gameplay involves taking up your role as Moonbury’s chemist and trying to help the residents with problems in their day-to-day lives. It can broadly be divided into interactions around town, venturing into the wilderness to get components, and using your workspaces.

First, you have the residents. Interacting with people in Potion Permit is less a fun side activity, and more vital to progression. The townsfolk are a wary lot and will be hesitant to ask for help until they feel safe around the chemist. As such, raising relationships with the townsfolk is essential for getting quests. This can be done by talking to them or gifting them moon cloves. Everyone likes moon cloves, so you don’t have to worry about accidentally giving people something they hate. As people start liking you a bit, they will begin posting quests on the job board that you can take, which double as nice flavour content about the people too.

Accompanying you around town is your dog, who, in addition to being adorable, brings a feature that I loved, and wish was possible in other games in the genre. Ask him to find an NPC, and he will lead you to wherever they are in town. It saves so much time on quests and means not having to study everyone’s daily routines to get what you want. Great design!

The areas outside of town are where you will forage for ingredients. These have plants to pick up, trees that can be cut, and rocks that can be cracked for materials. There are also a number of creatures wandering about. Some are hostile on sight, though many will be wandering around minding their own business. All of the animals do drop ingredients, some highly useful. Taking a big hammer to an adorable little armadillo creature was truly my biggest villain moment, but science requires sacrifices.

Your workshop and clinic are the third factors, and one of the unique selling points of Potion Permit. From time to time you wake up to a siren on the HUD lit up, signaling that one of the villagers is unwell, and have been brought to the clinic, next to your house. Heading inside you are presented with your patient, and through some arrow-button mini-games will need to diagnose their problems. Once that is done, you’ll need to supply them with the correct medicine for their health issue. 

The potion brewing system is impressively well thought-out and quite possibly my favourite take on a crafting system I’ve come across in a long time. Each potion recipe essentially works like a jigsaw puzzle, with each ingredient having a shape associated with it that you can piece together to fit the shape. So, lots of different combinations can potentially be used to make a particular potion. Rather than forcing you through the tedious exercise of going to look for particular items to create something, the system instead incentivises picking up a wide range of ingredients when you’re out and about because they are highly versatile.  It feels a lot less rigid than other similar mechanics from other games, and actually made finding new plants feel like new tools more than just something for a shopping list..

Visuals And Audio

Potion Permit embraces cute pixel style in its visual design. The place is rendered with a bright, idyllic aesthetic that never fails to be appealing to look at. Even the monsters are adorable. 

The character designs are interesting, there are some stand-outs among more average-looking citizens, but as a whole, it looks solid. A few sprites do feel very slightly off. Your character sprite’s sideways run suffers a little from the stylization, with the character’s big head and tiny feet looking a bit impossible in the runner pose, but it’s something you quickly get used to.

The game doesn’t use bust art or character portraits, instead opting to have emotes appear above characters’ heads in dialogue. It works fine, though I did think it was a shame not to be able to see some more detailed renderings of the villagers, given there are plenty of really fun designs. Fan artists will, I’m sure, fill the void. 

Audio works great for the genre and gives you exactly what you’d be looking for. Cheery themes, that rise to a crescendo when battle kicks in. Most of what I heard was the general town theme, which is still rolling on an eternal loop in my head as we speak, so clearly, the composer was doing something right. Dialogue is accompanied by chatter noises, which are subtly different between different characters, which is cute.

Replayability 

While the doctor-themed mechanics of the game are a welcome departure from things like farming and building, the one aspect it may struggle in is giving reasons to play over again. Unlike farms, which are naturally going to allow for a lot of variation, you are somewhat tied into running your clinic a certain way. There’s an element of randomness to your cases, so there might be interest to draw from that, though a lot of the gameplay is unlocking items.

While additional playthroughs might not necessarily be a draw, there seems to be enough content to keep going for a while. 

What It Could Have Done Better

While overall the game is very solid, one or two things did jump out at me straight away that could put a few people off continuing.

Firstly, the controls are clearly made with console in mind. Without a controller, you are stuck with a keyboard-only control scheme and no mouse support. The default key bindings felt pretty uncomfortable, with J and K keys being the main interaction buttons. I was not a fan. Switching onto a controller revealed a second issue, bugs. 

There are some polish and bug-fixing issues that need patching. I switched to using an Xbox PC controller, and after a half hour or so and some mild confusion, it became clear that the game would not register either trigger controls, not allowing me to whistle my dog and condemning him to an eternity of being hungry but unable to be fed. This appeared to be an issue that had affected a number of other players and had been an issue for some time. Eventually, I discovered that re-connecting with the game running seemed to fix the issue, but I could see people panicking over major mechanics not working.

There were a few other minor polish problems. My dog’s kennel fluctuated between the dog’s name and the game’s default name for him. An NPC’s eyes disappeared when his sprite sat down. The issues are mostly minor and will hopefully get patched out, as the quality of the game does outdo its first impressions.

Verdict

While initially some of the polish issues didn’t make the best first impression, Potion Permit’s good design, quirky charm, and willingness to improve upon its genre drastically increased my respect for it as time went on. It grew on me.

It isn’t simply trying to ape Stardew Valley or My Time At Portia with a different gimmick, but rather attempts to work on what games like those have done to create its own, slightly more streamlined experience. If games like those are your thing, then it’s definitely worth giving a try.

Potion Permit is now available on PC via Steam, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch.