Potion Craft creator: "If I couldn't make the control perfect, the game would never work"

If you like titles that are easy to understand but challenging to complete, you'll definitely appreciate our recommendation of Potion Craft. The alchemist simulator in which you manage a medieval fantasy potion shop, while researching formulas for new and surprising effects in your concoctions, has been hugely popular on PC and Nintendo Switch, and more recently upon its arrival on PlayStation and Xbox. But its gameplay is heavily reliant on precision to strike the perfect balance between making a useful potion and not a deadly concoction for your potential customers, so that control had to be "perfect", as its creator, Niceplay Games CEO Mikhail Chuprakov, tells us in an interview during DevGAMM 2024, which you can watch in subtitles below.

"As a gamer, I really enjoy those little details and features in other games," said Chuprakov. "So I wanted to make something, well, perfectly done, and one of the things I wanted to make work is the controls. It was something I wanted to make perfect, and I think without the attention to detail, [the game] wouldn't work."

Potion Craft is underpinned by the idea of making increasingly powerful potions with enhanced effects, but another of its main attractions lies in the fact that the same result can be achieved in different ways and with different ingredients, making each player's experience more unique. "I've always wanted a game where you have this, where you can make the potion the way you want with different shapes. So, yeah, I think this is one of the things that gets attention and keeps players in the game for a long time because they want to optimise, they want to use less ingredients, or they just want to do something different."

Of course, to achieve these better results, and given the complexity of the higher level preparations, it's possible that the difficulty curve has held many back from obtaining the prized Philosopher's Stone. However, that is something that will change with the new modes that will be added in the upcoming version 2.0 of the game.

"Before, you only had one difficulty and we tried to balance it for everyone. We had three types of players: normal players who are fine with everything, players who feel they don't have enough ingredients and can't win the game economy, and players who feel it's not hard enough for them, so that's why we now have four difficulties. Classic, Explorer, which is easier, and Grand Master, which is harder, much harder, and there's a hardcore mode called Suffering, which is really hard. Like real alchemy."

You can enjoy Potion Craft on PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, Xbox and PC.