Mini Review: Potion Permit (PS5) - Time to Play Doctor in a Charming But Buggy Town

Potion Permit throws you in the deep end. The town of Moonbury needs a chemist, and as a fresh graduate from the capital you’re shipped in to cure the mayor’s daughter who has succumbed to a mysterious illness. Moonbury residents don’t have a great track record with chemists, however, and that will become apparent as the story unfurls.

You’ll open a clinic next to your house, where you’ll diagnosis patients before heading out to forage for materials in the great outdoors. In your home is a giant cauldron, which you’ll use to brew potions. Each item you collect in the wild has a element assigned, and a shape. To create a potion you’ll need to fit the ingredients to make a larger shape, with a limit on the number of items you can use, though upgrading your cauldron means you can use more which is useful as the game progresses and you’re required to make more complicated tonics.

The residents of Moonbury, despite their reservations, are open to making friends. Talking to characters and gifting them with Moon Cloves increases your relationship meter, with certain characters available for romancing. The romance option itself is extremely limited, however – you just go on a date, with no option available for marriage as seen in similar games.

Proceedings in Potion Permit can get a little repetitive; diagnose patient, create potion, cure patient, rinse and repeat. Characters will often task you with fetch quests in order to progress your relationship with them, but after a while this all feels very samey as well.

Unfortunately, there are also a lot of bugs present in the game. Characters will glitch in and out of existence while you’re talking with them. Sometimes the whole screen will go black and your character will pop up in a different part of the map when fast travelling. It’s things like this that really stop Potion Permit from reaching its potential, and its charming visuals can only do so much to counter this.