[Review] Potion Party - Nintendo Switch

Developed By: RPGames
Publisher: TopHat Studios
Categories: Store Simulator
Release Date: 04.08.21

It’s a party! With Potions! It’s Potion Party, a game about running a potion store. Make potions, make money, make your store better, and so on. Become the top alchemist!

This is a bit of an over simplification of the whole process. The game does start off simple enough, early on. A customer comes in asking for a potion, you make it, hand it to them, and so on. How do you make the potions though, you ask. You have fruit in your indoor garden, water the plants to grow the fruit. Then we need to grind the fruit up into the appropriate powder color. Get a bottle, bring water and the power to your potion stations, and then we wait for it to brew. Hand it off, and you’re set. Soon you’ll be asked for potions of mixed colors, big potions which require twice the water and twice the powder, meaning twice the time. Potions bleached. Potions blackened with soot made from placing fruit in the fire.

This might get a little exciting or overwhelming. This is what we’ll use the money we earn for. Lets add more tables to hold things we have in standby. More plants, more mortar and pestles, more of the brewing stations. Lets even get a watering can so we can water more without having to refill as much. You can buy things to spruce up the shop that grant perks, like earning more money, having costumers stay longer giving you more time to make potions, or lowering rates of certain obstacles. Money can even be use to unlock newer characters with their own abilities, with one of the pricier ones giving you refill free water, and they can all be upgraded.

As the levels go further and you get more ways to make potions and different potions, you’ll also run into different things trying to get in your way. Ghosts, slimes that slow you down and need powder of the same color, thieves that hate water, and so on. Most are easy to get rid of, but if you don’t care to, you can just buy those accessories for the shop.

The graphics are simple, but cute and colorful, each of the characters you can play as has their own unique design too. Animations are on the minimal side, but with how fast the game goes, it’s never something I’d have the time to look for anyway.

Puzzle Party has multiplayer too! Hold your shop down competitively or have someone else do the jobs you don’t want to do. A fun game is immediately improved with friends. I love when something you could probably make organized by yourself, gets chaotic the moment you add one, two, or maybe even three other people.

While I usually dislike games that try to overwhelm you, I never felt that way playing Potion Party. The level timers are rather lenient with giving you enough time to make enough money to reach the next stage. And if you didn’t, you still keep the money you earned, so use it on upgrading a character or your shop, it will probably help you a lot. There might be a minor grind to unlocking everything, but levels all feel quick, so it’s not tedious.