alright. alright. fuck. okay.
obviously this is very good. i've gone back and played it again several times because it's very good. this is the kind of game where i would expect it to have like three potion ideas and then that's kind of it, even if it weren't in a jam, but there keep being new ones somehow even after i've logged like four hours of this. absolutely baffling.
and obviously it is great when a Thing happens to me. i mean. of course. (though it maybe could do with some more visual feedback; i'm usually staring at my own cauldron and don't notice whatever is going on on the other side of the screen, so sometimes things just sort of happen and i'm not sure when they happened or why. (i know the game is turn-based but i keep trying to go fast anyway))
that said there are some... light, mechanical, issues...
- the swirly candies are insane. every single time i ran into them i got locked into an overflow loop and there is just nothing i can do about that. at all. the only approach seems to be "win really fast", but i'm generally trying (in vain) to do that anyway and the candies reduce my ability to do it.
- i have no idea where this bovine potion came from but it basically ended the game immediately. i'd just picked up the elixir that increases your brewing time, because i'd never seen it before and wanted to see if it was worth it, and i ended up getting dealt basically just that and bovine potions with no accelerant at all until i was out of space. i didn't even cast or combine them a single time and they just kept coming and i could not get rid of them. i can't believe this is post-nerf too omg
i think the upgrade pathing is pretty interesting, certainly moreso than just straight deckbuilding, but it does mean that it's very difficult to try out new potions -- it's random whether i get offered them at all, and then it's difficult to make them work if i only take one (which usually happens, because my pool tends to have two allure potions in it, because i need those, because they're what wins the game). i'm not sure where else to go here that wouldn't be a radical change, but it adds a massive amount of sheer dumb luck to a game that already has a lot of it happening. maybe it would help, maybe even enough, if i could unlock some coarse adjustments to what i start with, like, different preset loadouts? or maybe just offer a wider selection of existing potions to modify, but only let me use three of them.
also i'm surprised that combining potions doesn't... do, anything? as in, if you combine two allure potions that would each give you 2 allure, you get a higher-level potion that would give you 4 allure. which is the same thing since both of the smaller potions would be cast anyway, right? in fact if you're going for space efficiency it seems like you might want to avoid combining potions at all, and instead keep them all as vials, the most compact shape. at level 6 the potion does vanish entirely into the background, which is cool, but that's only happened to me a handful of times.
but again it's not immediately obvious what you might do to change this, since you're using a lot of small whole numbers, so you can't say like... each tier is 10% better than two of the previous tier. that might work for allure where you could just add some decimal places or whatever, but it doesn't work when a potion's effect is "downgrade N of your opponent's ingredients". but maybe it doesn't matter. just strikes me as odd that the most visible Thing the game does has relatively little effect on the gameplay?
anyway this is real cool. it's good actually if you make a game that has enough for me to think about that i write like eight paragraphs about it