I've been reading a bit about Western medical history recently, and it's pretty wild going. Primarily because I feel like I have glimpsed, in that instance, what the whole game is getting at.

I committed! Fired the potion! And it worked! Frost!īig moment for me. I tested out various ingredients, which are really just directions to travel across the map, pieces of code for the cursor, really, and I eventually got myself to roughly the area where I expected the opposite of the fire potion might lurk. I saw, almost sensed, a faint line leading from the centre of the map and going in the opposite direction to fire. I had already learned how to make a fire potion, and to do that I had ended up exploring a region to the left of the potion map. I wonder how big that alchemical map gets?Ĭhris: There are plenty of lovely moments in Potion Craft's first hour or so, but the one that really stayed with me was the frost potion moment.

It's also a calm game to play, which I value highly, and clearly there's a lot more to unlock in it than I have, judging by the broken-down alchemical apparatus in the basement, which I haven't even touched yet. There's a soft parchmenty feel to everything and a sense of humour running through it. It's an interesting way to interpret the potion-making idea, and it's beautifully presented. But, as the only way to discover new potions is to explore further into the dangerous parts of the map, it's a risk you'll have to take. Automatically recording successful recipes, so you can see the exact ingredients, saves time.Ĭomplicating this navigation are obstacles on the map, things like piles of bones and swirling vortexes that, if you get too close to them, will ruin your potion attempt completely and force you to start again. And then every time you want to mix them thereafter, you need to navigate back there again. Potions are smallish circles and they are demystified when you reach them for the first time. And this somewhere you're trying to reach, nine times out of ten, is a potion. This movement is important because it can make the difference between reaching a point on the map and not. Some create a dotted line that looks like a jagged mountain range, while others swirl around like a drunken snail. Some go left, some go up, some go right, you get the idea, but they all squiggle around in different ways.

Real life craft