Potion Craft

Potion Craft is an alchemist simulator that has you brew potions for customers, explore a map of potion effects, collect herbs, and try to create the philosopher's stone. While the game starts out really strong, has a lot of attention to detail and an amazing art style, it ultimately drops 99% of the crowd before the end due to shallow gameplay and extreme repetition. Once you've seen the mechanics in the first hour, the rest of it is just the same thing over and over and over again. Literally 1.3% of people have completed the game (based on the achievements), which I think really says something about it. Worth playing on sale, but don't expect to finish it.

Pros

Original mechanics. To brew potions, you start in the center of a map with potion effects dotted all over it. Each herb you add to the potion moves it in a certain direction, and gameplay revolves around adding the right herbs to move your marker to the effect you want
Impeccable, cohesive art style
Nice attention to detail - like when you grind materials, they stain the pestle and mortar
You can save potion recipes to a book to quick-brew them later

Cons

While I appreciate the tactile interaction of grinding ingredients and stirring the cauldron, it's pretty clunky to do with a mouse. That being said, the controls are even worse on a controller / Steam Deck
Pages of the recipe book are very limited, and they only save one method of making it, so if you've run out of 1 herb you have to make it manually again
Although the idea of interacting with your tools manually initially starts out very tactile and engaging, it quickly becoming extremely repetitive having to do it multiple times per potion
One 30 second music track on loop
Although the customers come in with stories that would suggest there are multiple kinds of potions that could help, this is not the case. For example, a woman who has locked herself out of the house wants a potion that could help. Apparently a strength potion to smash the door isn't what she wants. Neither is a dexterity potion to pick the lock. I googled it, and apparently an explosion potion would be fine