absolutely incredible concept. "you mix potions in yourself with a vibrator and then milk them out through your breasts." just awesome.
i am happy to say i got through the whole game without spending a single cent on ingredients.
it was interesting to try to strategize about how to best manage all the potions to be efficient in terms of time and ingredients. what i ended up doing was always making one of each potion with the new ingredient so that the recipes would be in the book, and then mostly just making potions on-demand. i would keep a random set of whatever was lying around stocked in the shelf, which did often pay off. i did not utilize the drawer at the top at all as i did not know it was a thing until reading another comment.
there was a funny sequence where i was like, ok, i'm just going to stock a couple of potions. and then the next two customers both requested exactly the potion i had started randomly mixing.
it was cool that on the first day i could pretty easily keep track of all the recipes while the later days mostly required me to look at the book. it felt like a good combination of a memorization-based potion game and a non-memorization-based one.
it was very cool to see the various potion effects on mixie. i was too focused on the gameplay to pay attention to all of the details, but they were cool nonetheless. the shrinking one was very memorable.
it is neat how the "one unlock per day" pattern results in quadratically increasing difficulty (in terms of number of recipes). i think this curve felt pretty appropriate overall, the last day definitely felt a lot more frantic in terms of unlocking recipes than the earlier ones. that said, for me it never felt like there was that much time pressure, it was pretty laid back. i didn't fail the mixing that often which might have helped. (i did fail it a couple times for the last day recipes, though).
overall, very solid store management game!