Alchemist: The Potion Monger Review

Such a nice Alchemist simulator, filled with gathering ingredients, making and selling potions, and fighting enemies. It has 2 missable achievements and takes around 17h to complete.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: Around 17 hours
Estimated achievement difficulty: 3/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: Not yet a full guide, but on Steam you can find a guide with the heart recipe locations.
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: Yes, 2 of them. I’ll talk more of them at the end of this review.
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No, you can play on apprentice mode and still unlock all the achievements.
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

In Alchemist: The Potion Monger you run a potion shop… sort of. You will brew many potions and have 2 ways of selling them, by working on requested potions or by buying a market stall and selling them there. That last one is highly encouraged to do as quickly as possible because that way you can easily make money with the perfumes (which easily sells for over 120 gold and you can make a bunch of them very quickly). You’ll also doing some quests, the main quests and the local people will also have some quests for you.

Understanding the potion mechanism took a bit of time for me. The first equipment you can buy for your potion studio is easy to understand, the latter a bit more complicated and I bought them all at once which didn’t help to understand them all at once. However, the game does such a good job with features like the philosopher stone to show you the ingredients for one of the ways to make that recipe and all the equipment having a preview feature so you can see what will happen before you use it on an ingredient.

And those are not the only life features the game has. For example, there are portals to all the main areas, to hop around more easily. There is also the option to save a recipe on special paper so you can make it in the future just with one button press. I highly recommend investing in those, as it is just much easier. Another nice feature is the dog who can help you find ingredients if you take him with you.

Achievement-wise, you will unlock most of them by following the story and finding all the aspects within the 4 elements. Also just selling a lot through your own stand as well as brewing potions on requests will unlock achievements. So like 90% will come over time or with a bit of effort after finishing the story. I think that there are 2 missable achievements.. or better to say, I know at least 2 of them are missable because I missed them in my first playthrough, but I think the rest are not missable. The first one is to be mean to the farmer around the beginning of the game… the latter is being evil to the herbalist by not going to her for advice but going for the witch in the swamp. This is more towards the end of the game, but if you miss it, it takes around 3-4 hours to replay the main story when you know what you’re doing. So the moral of the story is…. don’t be a good potion monger…. be as evil as possible 😛

I give Alchemist: The Potion Monger 4 out of 5 stars.

This review for Alchemist: The Potion Monger was written on 23 October 2024, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 33 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.