There’s obviously something in the water—eye of newt, probably. Potionomics is the latest game where you throw leaves and sinew into a cauldron, though I daresay it would be a compelling game without that. It’s a game that spans multiple genres, but at its core it’s a shop simulator, where you run a potion shop in a cozy fantasy setting. You gather ingredients, brew the broth, and haggle with customers. Then you go to bed and do it again, day after day.

All with the aim, not of amassing a fortune, but of paying off a ridiculous debt that is forced upon you when you inherit your uncle's shop. It's more than you could normally do, which is why it's extremely helpful that there's a potions competition coming up, and with a huge prize that could wipe out your slate.

The competition imposes a strict structure and time clock on your turn-based shop management, with brew-offs against your rival occurring every ten in-game days. Choosing your options from a menu (everything is menu-based in Potionnomics), your days are divided into discrete blocks of time. Will you open the shop first thing in the morning, spending two time units to whip up your wares and earn some much-needed cash? But perhaps you should put some potions in your cauldrons first. Potions take time to brew, so while you wait, you can go out and buy ingredients, flirt with the NPC vendors, or task a hero with raiding the wasteland in search of rare supplies. Before you know it, the day is over and you’ve forgotten to open the shop.

It’s easy to pass the time outside of their shop, as the other vendors are memorable characters, brought to life with expressively animated talking heads and funny, if comfortably tropey, dialogue. You can romance them, and here it feels a lot like a Persona game, as you allocate blocks of time to build bonds, eventually unlocking cards for the deck-building minigame. This isn’t necessarily a criticism, but you should know that there’s no voice acting. Maybe I just expected it because of the high-quality 3D animation, but at times it felt like I was playing the game on mute.

You can't spend all your time flirting, though – there's a competition to be won. You need to submit three high-potency potions in each stage of the contest, and you'll have to make a very planning in order to brew them. Better potions require better ingredients, which you can either acquire randomly from heroes or buy directly from the head of the heroes’ guild, though there are definite pros and cons to each. Heroic quests take time, gold, and potions to produce worthwhile results, while investing in the guild risks disrupting the ecology of the monstrous wilderness around you.

Ingredients in hand, you must throw them into a cauldron, and here it becomes a game of careful numbers management. You won’t recognize the ingredients by name, but by their magimin composition – magimins being the magical essences that infuse all the plants and creatures on the island. To make a health potion, for example, you need a roughly equal number of red and green magimins. The easiest and cheapest way to achieve this would be to throw a feyberry (containing six red magimins) and a mandrake root (six green magimins) into your bubbling pot.

These Lesser Potions will only get you so far, though. To earn more money from customers—and have any hope of beating the competition—you’ll need to utilize these rarer ingredients. So you move on to the next tier of health potions, combining a Fairy Flower Bud, two Desert Metals, and a Golemite. You now have some Common Health Potions: more useful for heroes, and with a higher market value.

Things quickly get complex when you start brewing potions that require three or more different magimins, as it can be tricky to get the numbers in the correct proportions. There are some leeway, but only a little. I spent a lot of time on the brewing menu, throwing in and removing ingredients, and eventually found it exhausting.

I found solace in the haggling minigame – or perhaps ‘minigame’ is selling it short, as haggling could easily be a separate game. Here Potionomics turns into Slay the Spire, as you ‘battle’ customers with cards, so that they (hopefully) pay more than the asking price for your goods.

It’s a unique twist on the formula, with different goals beyond winning the battle – a sale is pretty much guaranteed, you just want to fleece the customer as much as possible. Instead of spending energy playing cards, you’re draining the customer’s patience level, which decreases with each card played and the turn ends. It’s possible to secure a worthwhile win in a single turn if you’re dealt a good hand of cards – something that’s not entirely down to luck.

Unlike many deck-building games, you can freely add or remove cards from your deck before battle, using cards obtained by interacting with friendly vendors. I enjoyed managing the deck as the number of cards isn’t overwhelming, and they’re helpfully categorized under each of the major NPCs.

These haggling battles are by far the most enjoyable element of Potionomics, being light, fast-paced, but packed with charm and simplistic tactics. This last element is expanded upon in the competition’s haggling battles, which are essentially three-way boss battles between you, your rival, and the judge. Here, all your hard work—all your potion-brewing and bargaining and bonding and inventory management—pays off in a glorious showdown that either validates or punishes your efforts leading up to the competition.

Despite being made up of seemingly disparate parts, Potionnomics feels extremely cohesive, with all of the elements interacting with each other and contributing to your greater goal of beating the competition. You can play richer life sims, or dating sims, or deck builders, or shop management games, but you won't find another game that so deftly mashes all of these genres together.