An enhanced version of the 2022 PC hit, Potionomics: Masterwork Edition introduces you to a fabulous fantasy world through your very own magical business. You play as Sylvia, a novice brewer who inherits her uncle’s potion shop and enormous debt. Luckily, a series of potion brewing competitions happen to offer prize money of exactly the amount you need to make each payment when the debt collectors come calling.

The gameplay consists of the day to day management of the shop, developing your business and ingratiating yourself into the surrounding community of colourful characters. People you meet around town bring the game to life, as well as offer the tools you need to make your business a success. You meet heroes who can venture out into the surrounding areas to source new ingredients for you, a witch who can replicate and stock those ingredients for purchase, and various craft folk who can help with upgrades to your shop and equipment.

Each day is broken up into time slots you can use to set potions brewing, sell the potions you’ve already brewed, and travel around town visiting your friends, while managing your stress level. Different tasks take up different amounts of time, and figuring out how to make use of these as efficiently as possible becomes crucial as the tension swells. Getting the hang of the daily routine isn’t particularly hard, but making sure you have everything you need to thrive soon gets tricky.

You have ten days between each stage of the potion brewing competitions, each of which requires you to bring three specific potions to showcase and sell. In those ten days, you need to figure out which ingredients will create those potions based on colour-coded recipes. You have to brew other potions to provide heroes going out on expedients and to sell to the community. This allows you to source those ingredients from the heroes who can retrieve them and the shops that sell them.

Selling your potions requires you to haggle with customers that come into your shop. Each potion has a base price determined by its type and quality. Upgrades to your shop, including general decorations and specific display shelves, boost this. Then you haggle with customers in a turn-based mini game where you use a deck of negotiation skills to get the highest possible price for each sale. You start with a basic deck which you can customise with cards you gain as you develop relationships and learn from other characters. Stress you carry into the negotiations scuppers your haggling skills, while taking time to relax with your friends reduces your stress.

Your opponents in the competitions are cleverly written and satisfying to defeat. The writing effortlessly weaves in ideas of environmentalism, uncouth legal practices, data mining, and more in a way that fits with the fantasy setting and raises genuinely interesting conversations about issues within contemporary business practices.

It’s very easy to get sucked into the world of Potionomics. The characters are wonderfully developed in terms of design, dialogue, and relationships. The management of the shop is a fun challenge, and the card battles to haggle make for a fun approach to the selling element of the game. The aspects that are left up to chance—such as the random nature of ingredients found on expeditions—can be frustrating, but even then it serves as an accurate reflection of the limitations of your control over the world around you.