Potionomics has a familiar flair to anyone who’s played ye olde Recettear or the more recent Moonlighter. Sylvia the witch is the proprietor of a failing potion shop and has to revitalise the store to repay its debts. Sounds familiar, aye? As I understand it, Potionomics does away with the dungeon crawling and instead doubles down on producing and peddling items in your shop. “After using magical ingredients to brew up a bevy of potent wares, the budding entrepreneur will wheel and deal to make sales with a colourful cast of fickle customers, all while tackling fierce competition and an ever-changing economy,” say Xseed. The new trailer shows off the card system for Sylvia’s bartering skills. She has to manage her own level of stress during the negotiation while also tracking the interest level of her customers. The “Reel ‘Em In” card, for instance, says it deals 9 Interest points but appears to spend two units of time. “Press The Attack” deals only 5 Interest but lets you draw another card. It’s a neat system that appears just deep enough to offer a challenge. On top of that, Sylvia has to buy ingredients and brew potions, presumably managing the cost of ingredients and the possible profit from potions they’ll go in. She can customise the style of display tables and placement of items in the store as well. I’ve been following Potionomics’ progress for several years now. It’s a regular delight in my weekly perusal of the #ScreenshotSaturday Twitter tag. I’d mostly only seen character animations thus far, so it’s great to see the new trailer showing off some of the depth in the bartering system. Potionomics still doesn’t have a release date, or heck, even a store page. You can keep up with it on Twitter until Voracious and Xseed announce a launch window. Whatever you call it, hit our E3 2020 tag for more from this summer’s blast of gaming announcements, trailers, and miscellaneous marketing. Check out the PC games at the PlayStation 5 show, everything at the PC Gaming Show, and all the trailers from the Xbox showcase, for starters.
