Wow, this one was a gem. I actually discovered it well before its release when a tweet from the game's official Twitter account showcasing some of Roxanne's animations crossed my feed.

Given that I am a very simple man and Roxanne is one of the hottest bitches imaginable, my interest was piqued. What luck that the game she's from turned out to be excellent!

(Minor spoilers for Potionomics to follow.)

Da Game

The narrative premise of Potionomics is short and sweet: recent witch school graduate Sylvia has just arrived to the semi-lawless frontier island of Rafta in order to inherit her presumed-dead uncle's potion shop. Unfortunately, she has ALSO inherited her uncle's million-gold debt, and her only hope of avoiding an existence of indentured servitude is through winning a series of potion-making competitions, all while keeping the potion shop running. That's it!

There's an extremely pleasing set of interlocking gameplay systems that form Potionomics's core loop, which are revealed extremely organically:

• Brewing potions requires ingredients. Every ingredient contains different proportions of up to five different-colored "magimins", and successful potion-brewing requires achieving precise ratios of said magimins (a standard-issue Health Potion, for example, requires equal parts red and green magimins). Potion quality is determined by the total number of magimins, but you're limited in how many ingredients can be put into the cauldron at a time (in other words, you can't make the highest-quality Masterwork Health Potion simply by stuffing the cauldron full of the cheapest red and green ingredients). Thus, in order to make higher-quality potions, you need to acquire higher-quality ingredients.
• To obtain new ingredients, you'll primarily be sending heroes from the Heroes Guild out into the wilderness to collect them. These heroes will need to be paid, and their chances of success (and of gathering rarer ingredients) are much improved by providing them with potions that allow them to overcome obstacles. You can also spend money on large-scale expeditions for specific ingredients, or purchase grab-bag chests filled with random ingredients.

• Brewing higher-quality potions will also require higher-quality gear, as well as fixing up the dilapidated potion shop. Doing both requires money, ingredients, and fuel.
• Your only option for gaining money is through selling potions. Obviously higher-quality potions sell for more, but a number of other things affect the price: potions can have good or bad qualities (such as smelling good or bad), shelves and display cases can drive prices up, and daily events (such as festivals or disasters) can increase or decrease the values of certain kinds of potions. However, the thing you'll be doing MOST to influence the selling price of you potions is haggling.

• Haggling takes the form of a card game, in which Sylvia plays cards in order to increase a customer's interest in a potion (and thus the price they'll be willing to pay for it), influence how much patience the customer has for dickering, and shield herself from criticism and stress. However, Sylvia is a better potion-maker than she is a salesperson, and her starting deck of haggling cards is pretty slim.
• Luckily, Rafta is filled with other vendors, artisans, heroes, and assorted personalities for Sylvia to befriend (and romance, if you want) Each of Sylvia's friends can provide her with insights that she can then employ in her deck of haggling strategies. For example, woodland carpenter Saffron (pictured below) provides an array of cards that manage Sylvia's stress and increase customer patience.

• Finally, most actions cost time. Potionomics works on a ten-day cycle, at the end of which Sylvia must compete in (and win) another potion-making competition in order to pay down another portion of her uncle's debt. Each day is divided into six segments, and things like opening the shop to sell potions, moving around town on errands, and hanging out with friends all eat up that time.

And that's it! It probably seems like a bit of a jumble when laid out all at once like that, but the game takes you through it at a much more digestible pace.

Da Look

I don't need to tell you that this game is gorgeous to look at. The menus are crisp and attractive. Every scene features stunning hand-painted backdrops. The haggling cards are replete with expressive character art. Even the icons for the potion-making ingredients are packed with personality. But the star of the game (and something everyone comments on) are the character animations.

I've been watching through this GDC talk by Voracious Games's "animation and pipeline overlord" Anguel Bogoev, and early on he talks about one of their philosophies with the animations being "Rather than giving the player verbs, we were making a library of adjectives. The verb is always haggle, or maybe "talk"." (It should be mentioned that the vast majority of the game's animations were actually CREATED by animator Emily Lattanavong - Bogoev was in a supervisory role). I really like this approach - Potionomics is, at its core, a game of menus and dialog, which can be VERY dry if pains aren't taken to jazz them up with character work. Potionomics is a symphony.

There are, according to Bogoev, over 3,000 character animations in Potionomics, and I believe it. The range of emotional expression this small team wrings out of their characters is breathtaking. Sylvia gets the most attention as the main character - she's both a little gangly and a little brawny, moving through conversations with a limb-pinwheeling physicality that's a joy to watch. Catty enchantress Roxanne puts on a clinic of flounces. Hero guild leader/bartender Baptiste, an ambitious third son of an impossibly wealthy dynasty, puts forward a kind of irrepressible highbrow theatricality. Muktuk, a walrus-man craftsperson of cauldrons and more, was apparently inspired by Fullmetal Alchemist's Alex Armstrong, and thus is a fiesta of flexing and mustache-twirling. Tsundere clairvoyant Quinn slouches, slumps, and leans with such delectable articulation as to practically become a human ampersand. Even the generic customers of the potion shop, with names like Shy Affluent and Peppy Commoner, bounce and gesticulate their way enthusiastically through the haggling process with more charisma than most games manage to imbue in their protagonists. As good as the writing is (and it IS good, and frequently great) the variety and quality of the character animation practically renders it redundant.

Da Characters & Writing

There really aren't any weak links on the Potionomics cast (well, okay, Corsac's a little bit bland, but he's the exception that proves the rule). I wound up romancing Quinn and maxing out the relationships with Roxanne, Muktuk, and Mint, getting very close with several others. I can honestly say that there wasn't a single piece of written dialog that I didn't enjoy. Basically all of the story is told via dialog, and while the main plot TECHNICALLY occurs all on its own, every individual character's progression dialog reveals another interesting facet of the world and what's going on within it. Here are a few of my favorites:

Walrus-man Muktuk is the Dude Of The Century. I fucking LOVE this guy. Muktuk is a journeyman artisan on a pilgrimage, the goal of which is to gather new ideas and perspectives and eventually channel them into his very own masterwork. Muktuk's writing strikes an excellent balance between well-earned bravado and a simmering crisis of faith in his own abilities. It also bears pointing out that Muktuk is big and fat and this is never once used as a cheap punchline - narration often credits Muktuk for his strength and grace, and Sylvia's flirtatious options in her dialog with him leaves no doubts that she likes what she sees. I think Muktuk could very easily carry his own game (I mean, just look at those arms).

Mothgirl marketing expert Luna was one of the characters whose storyline I didn't prioritize, which I'll hopefully make up for in a future playthrough. What I DID see from her was pretty endearing, though - two of her four hands are always busy on her phone, and she very clearly has some self-worth issues to worth through regarding how her parents see her (she's one of 84 children - a freelance marketing consultant amidst a literal flock of doctors and lawyers).

Ageless and vampiric potion mogul Anubia is the fourth boss of the game, and unfortunately she doesn't stick around for very long. Her entire deal is a pretty explicit Amazon Corporation satire - she's determined to undercut local businesspeople with a mixture of cheap potions and same-day delivery courtesy of her legion of soulless husks (which she also uses to gather personal information on her customers). She really comes alive in her animations, which you can see some samples of on the Potionomics Twitter account.

Finally we come back around to babygirl extraordinaire and not-so-secret succubus Roxanne, who started me down this road all those years ago. Roxanne's not JUST eye-candy - she wound up being one of my favorite characters in the entire thing, to the point that I actually got a little bit of buyer's remorse for romancing Quinn instead of her. Roxanne's dialog is wonderfully sharp and catty, with her never being found wanting for a caustic barb at Sylvia's expense. She makes no apologies for being the kind of person she is, and her arc in the game revolves around coaxing her around to see herself as someone who doesn't NEED to take cynical shortcuts.

Da Music

Composer Greg Nicolett went kind of crazy with this one. This soundtrack possesses an INSANE number of memorable, fully-orchestrated earworms. Not only does the game have an incredibly comprehensive general musical soundscape, but every single character enjoys their own custom soundtrack, each complete with their own unique form of instrumentation. It's almost a shame the animations overshadow almost every other aesthetic aspect of this game, because in another universe I think we'd be saying similar things about the score.

Here are some of my personal favorites, thoughtfully provided by Nicolett on his YouTube channel and complete with an assortment of relevant in-game and production art. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that the full soundtrack is available for purchase on Nicolett's Bandcamp as well.

Muktuk again! Dude simply fucking rules in all aspects. I adore the vocalizations, the color instrumentation, and the sheer full-bodied robustness of the brass. It's Muktuk all the way, baby!!!

The theme of cat pirates Salt & Pepper is undeniably the one I found myself humming to myself most frequently. It's kind of incredible - by rights, a track that makes cat-meowing vocals as front-and-center as this one OUGHT to be unbearable. And yet!

The potion-making competitions consistently had stellar scores, each one customized to whichever character Sylvia happened to be squaring off against. I enjoyed every one of these tracks enormously, and wished that I had more opportunities to hear them in-game. I love the cut-ins of Nicolett on the melodica in this one.

Da Conclusion

I enjoyed Potionomics so thoroughly that I spent a solid chunk of today writing this longass glowing review of the thing as though someone was paying me to do so (I am not, in fact, being paid). I kind of feel like that speaks for itself. I really strongly encourage you to check the game out on Steam if any of what I've written here resonates with you. If you'd prefer to play on console, you have but to wait a few months for the Masterwork Edition to drop, which will also be adding an Endless Mode and full voice-acting.

Da Post-Script

While playing Potionomics, I found myself recalling the time I spent playing not-very-good-big-budget porn game Subverse for the second issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology. While it might seem like an apples-to-oranges comparison at first blush, I think there's more than a little overlap there.

Both games have significant visual novel components and are built in Unreal Engine 4. Both are extremely animation-heavy. Both are the first project by a small core team who, while they might have had a lot of analogous experience, didn't have a lot of actual gamedev experience. Both games clock in at roughly 30 hours apiece. Both started development at around roughly the same time.

Considering all that, I just thought it was, y'know, INTERESTING how Potionomics wound up being one of those games that made me remember why I love video games as a medium so much, while Subverse was possibly the most painful experience I've had playing a game that I've had in well over a decade. I wish it was possible to place both teams and their respective development styles side-by-side to really dig down into how that came to be.