After graduating from Wizard University, you try your luck at finding a job, only to discover that even entry-level jobs demand at least five years’ worth of experience. Fortunately, somewhere in the countryside, one lonely potion shop is hiring. And so, your adventure begins.
I love shop sims. I love co-op chaos. I love brewing strange concoctions for strange customers. Potion Shop Simulator seemed tailor-made for me… but sadly, it struggles to deliver on several fronts.
Developer: Pebbles Games, Bird Pals SIA
Publisher: Pebbles Games
Genre: Indie, Shop Sim, Management
Release Date: March 5th, 2025
Reviewed on: PC
Available on: PC
Copy was provided by the developer.
You arrive in a quiet region where the local alchemist has mysteriously vanished. Conveniently, this means you don’t have to pay rent or seek permission to take over the shop. A friendly young dragon introduces the basics: gather herbs in the wild, process them into potions, and sell them to customers. If you want to, you can risk losses or mild winnings by haggling with ’em… or you just let them buy your goods using the standard pricing.
The core gameplay loop of “gathering, processing, selling, upgrading” is very simple, of course, but I do think there’s a certain charm in that simplicity. You can approach the game however you like, and with co-op support, one player can roam the fields while the other experiments at the cauldron… or one player sells everything all the time while the other tries to meet the demand. It can be fairly fun, actually!
Potions are brewed by balancing elemental ratios in your cauldron. The closer you get to the target ratio, the higher the potion’s quality and value. Herbs can be thrown in fresh, dried to boost potency, or crushed for multiple dosages. With just a few plants, you can create a surprising variety of brews… and then the game introduces more new plants as you go, resulting in even more possible combinations. All of it doesn’t even feel all that overwhelming or anything. It’s surprisingly beginner-friendly.
As you play the game and sell potions to customers, you can then use the amassed fortunes to buy upgrades for your shop. Bigger cauldrons to fit in more ingredients, a distiller to raise the quality of a potion after brewing, gnomes to handle specific chores, plant pots to create your own little garden, or perhaps decorations to increase the prestige of your shop and attract higher-paying customers.
While there is a pretty lengthy guided tutorial and an incredibly repetitive questline, the game eventually opens up, letting you run your shop however you wish. That part’s great.
What’s less great, though, is the overworld. You head into town frequently for upgrades and into the fields for the sake of gathering herbs and the like… but it’s just so empty. The vast areas are incredibly lifeless and completely unnecessary. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but even a loading screen would have been more helpful in this case. What point is there to having a huge area to traverse when the area is empty?
Beyond that, the game does feature decorations and the like… but so many items in the shop are immovable and as such cannot be changed. There is not enough customization available in the game beyond adding more clutter. Walking around can be a bit of a pain, and after a few hours, the game (with its ONE looping song) does get too repetitive to enjoy properly.
I mentioned how the game offers freedom earlier but it really feels unintentional. The story is thin and mostly comprised of fetch quests, the mystery isn’t really compelling enough to justify the busywork, and the world is just tedious to traverse and filled with a whole lot of nothing. It’s a bit disappointing, in my opinion.
Sometimes the game feels and looks pretty janky but I honestly don’t mind that all that much. Heck, Shoppe Keep is such a weird lil game and it’s incredibly janky but decides to lean into it. The comedic take works fairly well for the formula, so I do highly recommend that game if you’re into something similar to this game.
Potion Shop Simulator, though, struggles to find its identity. Do we want to serve our patrons or do we want to uncover some type of mystery that feels too tedious to fully pursue? Doing both harms either in more ways than one.
Alas, I don't think I can recommend Potion Shop Simulator at the current price point (17 bucks!), although it is fairly laid back and fun with friends, if you can look past the repetitive gameplay, tedious fetch quests, and if you mute the one track available in the game.
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
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