Potion Shop Simulator | PC Review

June 13, 2025 Jacob Gunderson

Ah, the dream of owning your own potion shop and living in a small town filled with monsters. There was no work for you in your local towns, so you traveled far to get here and now you’re in a town full of monsters, OK. It isn’t all bad and they seem friendly enough and in a town with no alchemist, they need you just as much as you need them. Published and developed by Pebbles Games with help from Bird Pals, Potion Shop Simulator drops you into the role of a newly graduated alchemist going to get a job, but once you get there the store owner is nowhere to be found. Tim, a small flying dragon, helps you clean up the shop and gets you on your way to start selling and finding the owner.

Into the Woods

It is time to brew, but with no ingredients and no money to buy them, you’ll have to go find them. Walking around the outskirts of town will allow you to find some of the more basic ingredients you’ll need to get on your feet. After some time and a few sales, you might have saved up enough to buy plants of your own making it easier to brew potions and without having to leave the shop. Speaking of buying, going into town and buying upgrades for not only your shop but the equipment in the shop is a large part of making it as profitable as possible. Successfully selling potions raises your reputation and when combined with decorations in the shop, raises your shop level giving you access to new ingredients, potions, and patrons. New patrons want different potions and different potions need new ingredients. As you explore the town and look for the missing owner, you will run into monsters with requests for various potions. Completing these requests will give you small rewards or help you find the owner.

No Time to Kill

A few things stood out to me as major issues. First, leveling up invalidates potions. Because leveling up changes what customers you have enter the shop, certain potions and sizes are no longer used. Meaning towards the end of the campaign most of the things in the game aren’t even used. Second, is the amount of time it takes to do anything. Even in the early game while the potions are easier to make, I found my shop closed for days so I could get things in order to have the shop open.

At my point in the game, I am just mass buying potions to resell to my patrons. “But Jake, in a game about making potions doesn’t that defeat the purpose”? Maybe, but at the same time I alone do not work fast enough to fulfill the needs of my customers. With all the work that needs to be done just to make two potions, it would take me several in-game days to fill my shop and only one day to empty it. I am playing solo because I have no friends, but I do have all of the upgrades that I can get to make things easier and I still find it very time consuming to just move ingredients from point A all the way to G. This doesn’t include the time it takes to just make the potion itself since you have to move up to 20 ingredients individually from storage to the cauldron. I’ve actually resorted to placing the storages in strange places to make the process faster. Even if I did have helpers, because of the time constraints and the fact there is only one cauldron, the whole process bottlenecks anyway and then people would just be standing around with nothing to do, kinda like my last job.

After you complete the story and get your shop to max level the game continues. This both pleases me and angers me. On one hand, I don’t want replay value, I want continuation value. I have put time and effort into getting here and I would still like to play at this level with the things that I’ve earned. On the other hand, the endgame loop is buy potion, sell potion, watch.

In the End

I have roughly 50 hours into Potion Shop Simulator and while the game continues, I have no want or need to continue playing. I’m not getting better at making potions, it is not a struggle to keep the shop going, and there is nothing to see or explore. While the game does have frustrations, the dev team is still putting out updates and listening to the community of players.

Being absolutely honest, you aren’t missing anything by not playing this game.

To hear me talk more about Potion Shop Simulator, be sure to listen to the March 12th, 2025 episode of The Gaming Outsider Podcast around the 51:32 time stamp.

This review is based on a PC copy of Potion Shop Simulator provided by Starfall PR for coverage purposes.