In a big bowl of strychnine
Dilute some morphine
Heat in the pan
A good glass of petrol
Ho ho, I'll put two.
A few drops of hemlock
Leech slime
A very fine cut scorpion
- And a little peppercorns!
Nooon !
- Oh? Good.
Crumble your arsenic
In a glass of narcotic
Two spoonfuls of purgative
That we boil over high heat
Ho ho, I'll put three.
In a separate dish
Warm lizard blood
The value of a thimble
- And a little powdered sugar!
No !
- Oh? Good
You pour rat poison
In cobra venom
To sweeten the mixture
Squeeze three orange wedges
Ho ho, I'll put one.
Decorate with candied fruit
Moldy in verdigris
As long as your dough is soft
- And a little vitriol!
Nope ! ... Yes !
-Aaah... I knew I would have my Potion Permit.
As the original...um...intro so naturally puts it, today we're going to be talking about concoctions. And more precisely those that save life with Potion Permit, a game that puts you in the shoes of a young apothecary. The pitch? You have been sent to a remote medically modern island to rescue the mayor's daughter.
Once this mission has been quickly accomplished, you will settle on the island to provide minor services, not just sanitary, to the various inhabitants.
The game is presented as a farming game with its classic mechanics of schedules, product sales box, friendship levels, ingredients to collect, to which we add mini games related to patient diagnoses, as well as the concoction of potions.
Potion Permit does not, however, follow the farming games to the letter because there is not really any breeding or plantations to speak of. Instead, resources found outdoors will be replenished with each sunrise, making certain aspects of the genre much more accessible.
Overall, the game is relatively simple, whether it's the mini-games, the "gathering", the fights against the creatures, the title is not going to stand in your way too much if you regularly progress your equipment.
The design is, like many titles in the genre, quite cute. After all, it's a kind of game primarily with a family target.
But Potion Permit has something few of its brethren have: simplicity. Here, no big difficulty and a very simple gameplay whether for the classic phases of the genre with facilitating and terribly useful tools like the dog which will be used to find the trace of the person we are looking for at the moment T or again the lens shortcut system that can be easily switched without going through the menus. Moreover, these only serve more or less as a big guide rather than an essential passage for each little thing as too often in this kind of game.
So yes, these menus will still be there, but take my word for it when I tell you that the time spent on it is much less than usual.
I won't tell you anything by telling you that this test takes place on Xbox Series X. Well know, at least on this version, that the game runs without problems. The opposite would have been surprising since without being ugly, the game is clearly not AAA.
However, there are some rigidities in the fluidity of action for two things: the action button is the same as for rolling. So when you can roll, Steph rolls. And this is problematic because if you are close to the hitbox of an interactive object, it is the action of this object which will be taken into account whereas like Stéphane Eicher you only wanted to "Roll in peace". Yes, I invent words. But you need that to be able to make rotten jokes.
In the same spirit, when there are several interactive objects within reach (including NPCs), the game offers you a list of these objects with a non-intuitive manipulation to choose the right one to interact with.
Nothing too bad, but coming from a game that makes things like finding NPCs easier, having a tedious system of interaction is amazing. Like what you can't have the stroke of genius everywhere!
To conclude, Potion Permit is a good little farming game accessible and with its "medical" originalities that will make it less redundant. At least not like the others, because the mini-games run out of steam quickly.
It's also a very good first smooth step into the genre if you've never tried this type of game.
- Xbox (tested on Xbox Series X)
- PlayStation
- Steam
- Switch
