In most life and farm sims, these characters feel tertiary, and cutscenes featuring them are few and far between. I was also impressed by how much thought went into the characters who are not love interests. Even better is once you enter a relationship with them, you can date them anytime, with these dates cycling between a few different outings. Each of the six romanceable characters-three women, three men-are well-written and tender, eliciting more than a few butterfly-in-my-stomach moments from me. The town of Moonbury is filled with villagers, all with their own unique personalities and struggles, and your kind-hearted chemist is more than willing to help them work through them. In fact, alongside its narrative and gorgeous, muted art style, it might be the most interesting thing about the game. This isn't to say Potion Permit's social aspect isn't just as compelling. Fighting monsters and harvest sunflowers in the forest. While I am the type of life-sim player who find the most enjoyment in the social aspects of the game (you can catch me offering pizza to Shane far more often than you can find me in Stardew Valley's mines), the resource gathering and exploration in Potion Permit often had me wanting to leave the town and discover new plants, monsters, and meandering paths. Your reputation rises not only through healing the town, but by finding remedies to the environmental damage previous chemists inflicted. In addition to the woods, there are two other locations you can eventually unlock once you have enough money, stone, wood, and a high-enough reputation. Rather than farming to earn your resources, Potion Permit sends you to the depths of the nearby woods, where you must forage, chop wood, mine stone, and slay monsters to find your crafting materials. And although treating patients and earning a living is fairly straightforward, harvesting these ingredients is where the real fun comes in. Both the diagnosis and potion brewing games are fairly simple, but provide that sense of gameplay that makes them engaging rather than monotonous, a trap many life-sims can fall into. To brew a potion, you have to arrange ingredients-which take on the shape of tetris-like blocks-into a puzzle, with some limitations as to what kinds of ingredients you can use. If you have patients, you must first diagnose their illness via one of a few button-pressing minigames, then rush back to your home to brew up the correct potion to treat it. At the start of each day, you will be notified of any patients that have come to your clinic. There are several ways to do this, and they all come together to create Potion Permit's satisfying game loop. It's a compelling and original story for the genre, sending you on quite the quest: Make amends for the former chemists' mistakes and earn the town's trust. These prior chemists destroyed parts of the surrounding wilderness-rendering certain plant species extinct-the town collectively swore off chemists and their modern medicine. It turns out, you were not the first state chemist sent to Moonbury, and those before you did not leave a great impression. However, while the mayor and his wife are relieved upon your arrival to the sleepy, seaside town, they are among the only villagers who feel that way. You come to discover the reason the mayor sent for you is because his daughter is incredibly ill-so much so that not even the local doctor's methods are working on her. You play a chemist sent from the capital to the village of Moonbury at the request of its mayor. The latest game from Indonesian studio MassHive Media, Potion Permit is a life sim with RPG elements that tasks you with healing a community from both its ailments and its past trauma. However, what if, instead of inheriting a relative's legacy, you inherited years of resentment and distrust? What if, instead of a newfound farmer, you were a state-certified chemist, sent by the government to help an ailing town that has been burned by your kind before? This is the story Potion Permit sets up, and it's just one of the game's many fantastic qualities. We've seen some iteration of this story unfold in countless life-sim games, and to be fair, this formula is satisfying. Of course, this rundown ranch is in desperate need of repairs, but luckily for you, there is a town full of interesting (and eligible) villagers eager to see you succeed. You're overworked and in desperate need of a change when your grandfather coincidentally passes away and bestows upon you a cherished relic from your childhood: his farm.
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