I loved this game to bits — but you probably won't. This would be a "neutral" review if Steam allowed it.

As far as I'm concerned, Potionomics is a few UI and QoL updates away from a GOTY contender. But, in its' current state, you have to really want to play it.

I will write a proper review another time. The rest of this "review" will focus on developer feedback, but you're welcome to stay if you'd like.

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Filters
The game has well over a hundred potion ingredients. The ingredients each have five elements, from A to E. There is an extremely primitive filter in the brewing menu, which allows you to, for example, only show ingredients containing element A. Which means that this filter will show ingredients satisfying all 16 combinations of [A,B,C,D,E] which contain A. For reference: there are 31 possible combinations of [A,B,C,D,E]. So, on paper, the filter is less than 50% effective?
The problem could be solved by modifying the filters to have three states: [NULL/DOES CONTAIN/DOES NOT CONTAIN]. Also, by adding a "sort" function. Sort by: [ELEMENT/TOTALELEMENTS/QUANTITY].

Ingredients also have five traits: taste, sensation, smell, look, sound. These can only be good/bad. Filters "sort of" exist, but they're not very good. If you filter by smell, you will only get elements with the smell trait – both good smell and bad smell. To make things worse: If you have the enchanted smell boost active, it becomes completely impossible to tell whether an ingredient has a good smell or a bad smell, because the tooltip is changed to "enchanted smell". Taking such an enchantment may make it impossible for you to complete a special order. Again, it would be nice to have a [GOOD ONLY/NOT-BAD/BAD ONLY/NULL] filter.

Shop UI
There are no filters in the shop. None, whatsoever. There is also no shift-clicking, no right-clicking, no multi-selection, no sorting by quantity or price, etc. At least there is a tooltip to show you how much of each ingredient you have at home, that is very nice. But, honestly, I should be able to multi-select twelve ingredients with right click and press "confirm" once to buy the whole stock. Right now, that can take hundreds of clicks, and twelve confirmation screens to do.


There are other issues with the game such as not knowing what items to upgrade your tools with, or an insufficient tutorial – but those can be solved by playing with a wiki, or by writing things down. Hundreds of clicks per shop, or manually sorting through 100+ ingredients every five minutes cannot. A freeplay mode would also be nice, I guess?
Fingers crossed for future development. There really is quite a delightful game buried under all of this clunkyness.

I loved this game to bits — but you probably won't. This would be a "neutral" review if Steam allowed it. As far as I'm concerned, Potionomics is a few UI and QoL updates away from a GOTY contender. But, in its' current state, you have to [i]really[/i] want to play it. I will write a proper review another time. The rest of this "review" will focus on developer feedback, but you're welcome to stay if you'd like. [hr][/hr] [b][u]Filters[/u][/b] The game has well over a hundred potion ingredients. The ingredients each have five elements, from A to E. There is an extremely primitive filter in the brewing menu, which allows you to, for example, only show ingredients containing element A. Which means that this filter will show ingredients satisfying [b]all 16 combinations[/b] of [A,B,C,D,E] which contain A. For reference: there are 31 possible combinations of [A,B,C,D,E]. So, on paper, the filter is less than 50% effective? The problem could be solved by modifying the filters to have three states: [NULL/DOES CONTAIN/DOES NOT CONTAIN]. Also, by adding a "sort" function. Sort by: [ELEMENT/TOTALELEMENTS/QUANTITY]. Ingredients also have five traits: taste, sensation, smell, look, sound. These can only be good/bad. Filters "sort of" exist, but they're not very good. If you filter by smell, you will only get elements with the smell trait – both good smell and bad smell. To make things worse: If you have the enchanted smell boost active, it becomes completely impossible to tell whether an ingredient has a good smell or a bad smell, because the tooltip is changed to "enchanted smell". Taking such an enchantment may make it impossible for you to complete a special order. Again, it would be nice to have a [GOOD ONLY/NOT-BAD/BAD ONLY/NULL] filter. [b][u]Shop UI[/u][/b] There are no filters in the shop. None, whatsoever. There is also no shift-clicking, no right-clicking, no multi-selection, no sorting by quantity or price, etc. At least there is a tooltip to show you how much of each ingredient you have at home, that is very nice. But, honestly, I should be able to multi-select twelve ingredients with right click and press "confirm" once to buy the whole stock. Right now, that can take hundreds of clicks, and twelve confirmation screens to do. There are other issues with the game such as not knowing what items to upgrade your tools with, or an insufficient tutorial – but those can be solved by playing with a wiki, or by writing things down. Hundreds of clicks per shop, or manually sorting through 100+ ingredients every five minutes cannot. A freeplay mode would also be nice, I guess? Fingers crossed for future development. There really is quite a delightful game buried under all of this clunkyness.