Potions: A Curious Tale (Xbox)
Potions: A Curious Tale is an adventure game with a focus on crafting, and a “wits over weapons” approach to combat. This is conveyed clearly from the first interaction with an enemy, which lets you stumble into the right thing to do in a way that feels surprisingly natural. Similarly, the plot is explained through dialogue rather than explicit instruction or popups, but in a non-annoying and quite natural-feeling way.
As protagonist Luna, your aim is to develop your witching skills and potion reportoire by learning from your Granny, the towns potion master. During my play time, the majority of missions could be boiled down to problem-solving via fetch quests and exploring new areas to find ingredients for crafting a large variety of potions. The crafting system is based on blending different amounts of earth, air, water, and fire ingredients, which gives enough structure that you can start experimenting with combinations straight away. Some missions also include combat encounters, which are intended to be managed by using the environment (and even other enemies) to your advantage, rather than by just throwing potions everywhere.
One of my favourite parts of the game was its art style, which is aesthetically pleasant and calming but not boring. Each area has a distinct colour palette, collectibles, and cast of enemies. There are also some graphical quality-of-life features, such as ingredients being highlighted in purple during conversations and some interactable objects being highlighted in yellow. While there are no maps for individual areas, the visual clues provided are fairly easy to understand: for example, paths that lead back to the main map have a different appearance to the regular paths in that area. Also, once you have navigated to a deeper area of a zone, you can then choose to go back to that area. E.g. on reaching the Deep Dark Forest, you can choose to enter at the 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th sub-area. This cuts down the backtracking needed for longer quests without removing the locations entirely.
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