The Rundown (TL;DR)
Character customization
Relationship system
Rich housing upgrades and decoration
Lots of things to unlock and upgrade
Interesting story and characters
Upgrades galore
You get a doggy pal from the start!!
It’s Good
But first, a little bit of background—
In the last couple months I’ve been looking to fill the void that rune factory 4 left after finishing the switch version a while back, also sorely missing the comfort of playing something with pixel graphics. games like these are plentiful now thanks to the success of stardew valley and rune factory/harvest moon over the last decade plus, and I have my fair share on Steam that I’ve either purchased on a sale and never played or have logged about an hour in.
Potion Permit had sat in my library for about a year completely untouched until July when I got a steamdeck for my birthday, since I was the last in my group to have something akin to a ROG ally or a Portal; but I didn’t want to bother with having to manage another system with Windows on it
This is also a review from a perspective of someone who has not reached “endgame” yet but has 12 hours logged. So there’s things i obviously haven’t gotten to or seen yet!
Now with that aside let’s get to the meat of the review!
Here you fill the role of a chemist leaving the capital of a large metropolis to a quaint town surrounded by all sorts of biomes to harvest and explore from.
Upon arriving you aren’t treated very well by the townsfolk, they see you as a sort of threat to the local community in that you don’t “understand life here” but over time by chatting them up and giving them the gift of moon clove, something you obtain from helping sick townspeople who land in your rundown clinic, you’ll unlock relationship quests for them warm up to you… eventually. The first friend I unlocked a quest for was the town cat Kipps, which I super love that you can befriend the resident kitty cat.
Something I really enjoy about this game—and games like these— are ones that combine foraging/farming/combat with having a sort of responsibility/job management within the community.
Progressing feels great but the first hour can feel a little overwhelming from all of the people you should search for to introduce yourself to, and deciding what to upgrade first to get the ball rolling in terms of establishing a presence and growing your relationships.
Speaking of relationships, all romantic interests are available to you regardless of gender picked and can be pursued relatively quickly compared to other ‘harvestlikes’. However as of writing this, there is no marriage option so you’ll just be dating someone for a while until they decide to implement that system. Something which I really do miss from stardew valley is being able to have them move in and join your household, but from what I’ve seen online from the developers it’s definitely either planned for the future or being heavily considered.
A few of the things that I wish were a little different are the energy/stamina system and how much a consumable restores energy. I feel that you’re always having to balance a lot of wanting to do more stuff to progress and watching your stamina too much (at least until you unlock steel tools), which can be a few hours of game time.
This is just my opinion of course, and one I share especially for stardew valley, but I think some tweaking of how much is spent doing foraging actions would help in making you feel that the more you can collect from battle and foraging, the more progress you’re likely to make.
There too are a couple of bugs I’ve noticed with running it on the steamdeck like controller mode becoming disabled and you needing to relaunch the game to correct this, but this could also just be a steamdeck issue.
All in all this game is fantastic, and has definitely exceeded my expectations over being ‘just another harvestlike/farming simulator game’ and feels more unique to what this genre has to offer, giving you more options and freedom to focus on various aspects rather than just being a farmer/growing your crafting experience.
(You can buy potion permit here from Steam!)