I have such a love hate for this game. It has things that I like but it's just so clunky and janky that all the negatives, as tiny as they are, are given the limelight constantly. It just kinda sours the experience overall.
I'll start with the positive. I like the ideas and concepts that this game uses. Going out and gathering plants, slime, veggies, etc, anything and everything because everything has alchemical properties is basic and simple. I like how you use various tools to adjust the elements on your ingredients in order to fulfill the requirements needed to make a potion. I also like that making a potion is actually interactive with a simple mini game of making shapes to pop bubbles to increase the quality of your potions. I like that all the potions you make you can use on yourself or the villagers, and can even use them to open chests as that's the only way to unlock them is by hitting them with a specific potion as shown on the chest itself. I like that the gameplay loop is very simple: Run around and hoard everything and usually taking teleports back home to drop stuff off, go to town and check on your contracts, go back home and brew what you can to fulfill your contracts, and then spend the rest of your day figuring out how to progress the game by exploring, brewing, and figuring out the quests.
All that said, I'm constantly finding things that sour the taste of this game. To start with the tutorial of this game is really awful. It does a good job of telling you what to do in the order to do it, but it does a terrible job of actually TEACHING you the game. You get an example of that right out the gate as the first thing you're tasked to do after unpacking your wagon into your house is to brew a health potion to heal yourself. It tells you to open your almanac and look at the recipe for the potion, shows you the element you need to make the potion, and then tells you to go pick a plant that doesn't have the element at all. They tell you to grab a Calendula which has the growth aspect, not the cure needed for the potion. It doesn't tell you why you go for this plant, it just tells you to grab it, and then it tells you to grind it, and then brew the potion done. Then they make you do it again with a completely different plant for your dog. It isn't until around 20-40 minutes later (depending on how fast or slow you are) that you get told on the way to town about how your tools affect the elements, but not in the form of a quest but a pop up that tells you that you have a tools tab in the almanac. So the game never explains to you that your mortars affect the elements and that kinda left me confused for a bit until I experimented with it later and understood what was actually happening. Instead the tutorial is just "press this button, do this, now do this, okay next part of the tutorial" when it should be telling you "Your tools with change the elements of your ingredients so you can get just what you need." It also doesn't tell you that excess elements ruin the potion, and the game is about getting only and exactly what you need. Instead the most informative parts of the tutorials are the pop ups you get that are wildly spread out poorly, such as being taught about tools long after I stopped using them because it wanted me to go into town. Why wasn't this tutorial about tools and their effects at the start when it was telling me to use the mortar?
The vagueness of the tutorial is present throughout the game as well. All of the quests you get are either obviously stated or vaguely presented and there's no hints or anything. Something as simple as "Kill the slime king" is easy enough to understand but when you've got ones that are like "Help the lady "get up" with no hint or direction to work with. It's also something as simple as "Open the door" and thats it, and the hint at the door is so vague that combined with the poor progression of the game often leaves you wondering "Am I supposed to be able to do this now or should I do it later?" and not even know. Talking to NPCs that give you the quest don't give you any insight either so you're gonna just left wondering, throwing crap against the wall to see if it works or not, or looking it up in the steam discussions because you can't be bothered to care.
I want to talk about the potion brewing because I love and hate this concept because the concept is good but the execution leaves me hating it. When you brew a potion you're put in this mini game where bubbles will rise up and you can to match the shapes using your mouse to pop them to increase the progress bar and increase the quality of your potion. If bubbles make it to the top and pop on their own then it takes quality away from your potion. The idea is simple and you need to be quick to do it, but this ultimately has problems that kinda ruins the experience. Sometimes the accuracy of what is accepted gets really weird and unexplainable, especially for the lightning symbol. There are times when you can draw the same symbol like 4 times and it just never works, and then the 5th time it works when you did nothing different. Sometimes the bubbles come flying up super fast and only give you like 1 second to react to it while you're also probably popping other bubbles. Sometimes the bubbles get obscured by the ingredients, the spoon stirring the cauldron, or even other bubbles and if it spawns far enough in the back it could blend in with everything else and you might not even realize they're there before you're getting hit with negatives. On top of all that sometimes it just takes way too long. Some potions you get just enough to barely scrape by a 3 star potion, other times you get to 3 stars within a couple seconds and now you're just popping another 10 bubbles because you have to even if the potion is maxed out. The amount of time to brew and the bubbles to pop seem random and when you're manually brewing your potions (because the game has a skill that lets you have a chance at brewing 2 at once, but only for manual brewing) it just slogs on for so long when you just wanna hurry and get them done and move on. Honestly the potion should be done once its full.
This game also does the open world stuff I really hate which is making big areas that are full of nothing and having slow movement speed that makes it all a pain to do. Yes I enjoy gathering and hoarding materials but the game doesn't need to be so huge that it takes forever to do all of that when there's no points of interest anywhere. There are a few points of interests in the forest you start in but with ingredient spawns so wide and sparse you're just doing a lot of running around in the same areas and it quickly loses its charm. While there are teleports to the most important areas, it still becomes a pain if you wanna go to the lighthouse for free fish or you want to check out the blacksmith for a new sword and your only option is to spend the next 5 minutes hold shift and running. The sprint in this game is so slow and there is a potion to speed up your sprint it shouldn't be considered a requirement just for quality of life reasons. Just a little bit faster and a sprint toggle would be nice.
I get that most of my review is nitpicking garbage, but honestly because of how bare bones and simple this game is all those nitpicks come to the surface a lot constantly without anything good to distract you from them. Steam doesn't have enough space for me to talk about everything else I could ramble on about this game. It really is a nice game but it feels undercooked and unpolished, like there was more to be done but then it was just finished up and pushed out. Even though I like the game when I can get into it I definitely would personally say its more of a 5 dollar game than 14 usd. What charm it has is kinda ruined by its own clunky nature, vaguely directionless progression, and very basic graphics leaving it with honestly nothing all too special.
