I first played this game during its early access when it was first released. There's a lot of the game that I liked and didn't like but I figured that I figured that I'll put my opinions on hold until its release.

Now that it's released, I played it till the end and apparently my opinions about it didn't change much.

The game has a very consistent and strong theme. It felt like the developers had a clear themetic and aesthetic vision of the game from the very start and did not waver in achieving that vision. At least, there isn't a time where I felt the game is confused.

The gameplay loop is striaghtforward. You make potions, sell potions, buy ingredients, research new potions, make potions and repeat.

The main mechanic, I presume, is the exploration of the alchemy map. Different ingredients will dictate different paths you will take, and you will have to use a series of different ingredients to navigate through the map, avoiding obstacles, to find an 'effect'.

I thought that the alchemy exploration mechanic is novel and cool in concept. My worry was that I wasn't sure how it would scale in what I would consider a fun way. After all, you are exploring the same map over and over again. In my head, for exploration-based mechanics like this, I could only think of 3 ways to keep things refresh each run:

1. Add some level of procedural level generation.
2. Minimize the amount of times the players have to traverse the same map (ala quick travel systems, etc).
3. Add objectives that make players tackle the same map in different ways (ala Mario 64?)
4. Just don't let players play the same map (although this is probably not possible even what they want to accomplish).

These were what I was thinking when Potion Craft was in Early Access and a small part of me hoped that

I guess in a way, Potion Craft did point #2 and #3. They did #2 by allowing me to 'save' recipes, which is basically allowing me to add checkpoints in the map so that I don't have to traverse the same path again. #3 is accomplished simply by having concrete objectives.

However, it still felt a little repeatitive and tedious. I think the issue I have is that the objectives are too similar; they only differ by tediousness. No matter what you do in the game, you are simply asked to traverse to different points in the map.

I wondered if the developers could solve this. A part of me felt that the mechanics drove them to this wall and could not be solved. A small part of me hoped that they would be able to solve it on release.

Release came and I picked it up again, powering through towards the last chapters. There were many good changes but in the end, the repetitiveness of the main mechanic remains. I can really tell they tried with the new changes. For example, they tried to contrain what ingredients I can use by saying that some consumers have allergies (I didn't care because I was still making money). I am honestly not sure if contraining is a good idea to be honest, and the developers probably thought the same by making it a soft constrain; as players you can choose to adhere to it or not.

Anyway, the game is pretty good and worth a buy. Personally it feels a 8/10 game, but I can see how others might like it better than I do.

One side thing I wonder though. In the game, you can choose to serve evil and good customers. Evil customers are straightforwardly evil: blowing stuff up, murder, etc. Good customers can be straightforwardly good, but they are more horny; I wonder if there is any message that the developers are trying to imply...