Potion Permission Overview (Switch) | Nintendo Life
Created by developer MassHive Media, Potion Permit is a cute little social RPG that combines simulation and adventure. However, unlike most life sims that currently dominate the online store, Potion Permit has no crops to grow and no farm animals to look after. life sim fans who are fed up with farming.
Permission for a potion immediately transfers you to the role of a village chemist. You have been summoned to Moonbury at the special request of the mayor, so you must receive him. But upon arrival, the townspeople treat you coldly and do not explain why. So, despite being quickly airlifted into a private wilderness and instructed that your only goal is to cure the townspeople of any number of unlikely diseases, the game focuses on loathing the capital and its chemists and requires you to prove yourself.
Much of the Potion Permit story has you running around town trying to cater to everyone’s whims, whether it’s making friends or participating in quests through the local bulletin board, but each mission completed will unlock a piece of the mystery with the story to come. together like a puzzle. You may come across a character who has a far-fetched connection to where you are now, and they may play a vital role later. Yes, it’s video game time guys!
Moonbury is filled with unique characters you can meet and talk to and match the city’s level of visual detail; they are not mass-produced NPCs, and each one has a recognizable and unique personality. The Potion Permit introduces romantic bachelors and bachelorette parties as you slowly progress through the storyline, and you’re also quickly introduced to the town’s neat little tradition of gifting moon carnations, which provide a decent boost to friendship when needed.
The game follows a day and night cycle, completely unrelated to real time. As in Stardew Valley, you are given a set number of minutes of daylight to complete missions, forage for food, participate in combat, and heal needed citizens. Unfortunately, while it keeps you on your toes, the days sometimes seem too short, and we wondered where the day went when it started to get dark.
There are no fast travel posts in the city unless you want to go straight to your home from your location, so most of your time will be spent moving rather than completing objectives. However, we can’t complain too much as the town of Moonbury is incredibly well designed and a delightful place to walk; we were very happy to spend a lot of time walking through it at a leisurely pace.
While exploring the city is a great pastime, permitting a potion will quickly remind you of your goal if you slow down: make the townspeople feel better. To the right of the front door, you quickly open a clinic where your patients will be taken when they need your help. Each time you treat a patient, you’ll go through a series of mini-games that make the diagnosis much more thorough than just pointing out what’s wrong. The use of these mini-games makes the entire consultation process much more fun than a dialogue box and provides a great hands-on approach to gamified medicine.
Once diagnosed, you are tasked with creating a cure for the disease. When it comes to what your character does best – brewing potions – a whole new mechanic is introduced. Instead of just asking you to drop the right ingredients into a cauldron, you must select the ingredients and carefully put them together by hand. Each craftable item has a set of colored tiles and an element that is applied to an empty puzzle-like space in the cauldron.
You need to select the ingredients that are together to put the puzzle together in order for it to work, otherwise your clinic’s patients will be left without treatment. In addition, this mechanic encourages players to leave their cozy homes to venture into the wilderness and explore the extensive list of items that can be obtained from the Potion Permit, making the process significantly less repetitive than your standard quests.
But getting food is not as easy as just collecting items peacefully. The desert around the city is filled with aggressive enemies who will quickly attack you if you are not careful, although combat is unlikely to be difficult. Enemy attacks are easy to predict and in turn dodge with a single roll, and your character is much faster than any enemy, so there’s always the option to get away. Every tool given to you during your first loot can also be used as a weapon, so you will never get caught without it. No matter how easy it is to dodge enemies, they are just as easy to defeat. Each enemy also drops essential loot that can be used in potions, so at some point you need to stop running away from them.
If there’s one thing that can let down a Potion Permit, it’s the lack of challenges. While life sims tend to have fairly relaxed gameplay, this title hints at a challenge through complex mini-games and a combat system, but there’s nothing about it that keeps you awake at night. In some cases, especially when exploring the desert, we would really like to see more grief from enemies. Their predictable patterns allowed us to avoid attacks unless we needed to frantically collect loot, but even with a hit, your HP will never be detrimentally depleted. Stubborn townspeople will immediately warm up to you as soon as you cure the first patient; the only problem with befriending them is making sure you talk to them every day.
However, the visuals in Potion Permit are flawless. Everything takes on a charming fall pixelated look, and the amount of detail in each area on the map is enough to keep you exploring for hours. And the sound is just as beautiful, with a subtle soundtrack that immerses you in the life of the city dwellers. The sound never gets repetitive or stagnant and accompanies every aspect of your adventure without feeling intrusive. It’s a presentation that really elevates Moonbury and the game in general.
Conclusion
Potion Resolution attempts to implement fun mini-game mechanics through potion brewing and patient diagnosis, but beyond that, the lack of complexity and sense of repetition means it struggles to stand out in the vast field of life sims. However, it is a fun and charming experience that takes great pleasure in excellent presentation in both the audio and visual department. The potion permit fits the bill to pick up something every now and then and spend a few hours, and there are certainly enough quests that you can sink your teeth into and keep you entertained for a while, even if it’s not as exciting as the best. in Genre.
