I first came across Potion Tales while scrolling through my Google News feed sometime in early 2023. Through the power of the algorithm, Google recommended an article from Rock Paper Shotgun about a game called Potion Tales. The headline stated, “Potion Tales is a creepy magical puzzle game with no wrong answers.” I was instantly intrigued.
I didn’t actually read the article (because spoilers); the headline was enough for me to add the Potion Tales demo to my Steam library…where it unfortunately languished in the backlog for months as I got busy with work, travel, and general life things.
Every so often, I’d think, “I should make time for the Potion Tales demo today,” but it always got pushed off. Once spooky season (aka October) rolled around, I vowed to make time for Potion Tales, and I’m glad I did!
Potion Tales is being developed by Nighttrain Games, an indie studio based in Berlin. It is described as “a narrative-driven potion brewing game in which you brew magical potions for your customers to solve their unique problems.”
The game has a variety of potions for players to brew, and each one affects the story differently. There are so many different combinations and branching storylines that I’ve already played through the demo three times.
The gameplay is simple but effective. There are a limited number of actions players can take while making potions, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy! I created several “failed potions” by not reading a recipe thoroughly or adding ingredients in the wrong order.
One of the best things about Potion Tales is the atmosphere – you really feel like you’re running an illegal potion shop (which you are). The color palette, lighting, music/sounds, and characters all contribute to the experience. The developers put a lot of thought into making the experience as immersive as possible.
For example, all of the potion ingredients have unique sounds (the constellation flower is my favorite), and players can interact with every ingredient and reorganize the shelves. Want to sort potion ingredients by color? Or alphabetize them? Go for it!
Needless to say, the demo lived up to all my expectations. In fact, I loved it so much that I reached out to the developers to see if they’d be willing to talk about the game with All Access Arcade. They graciously agreed – see what they had to say about Potion Tales below!
Please note that this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
AAA: Could you please introduce yourselves and tell me about your role in the development process?
NG: Hi, my name is Fritz. I’m one half of Nighttrain Games; as such, I wear many hats. I am the main developer. I do most of the 3D models for the game as well, and I help with writing, though that’s mostly Kathy’s part. I can introduce her as well, but she’s not here right now.
AAA: You said she’s not feeling well. Could you please give us a little bit of background about what she does for Potion Tales as well?
NG: Yes. She does most of the writing and the 2D art. She’s sort of the lead, getting everything organized, getting everything to fit together as well – making sure that we work on the right things. I don’t know where I’d be without her.
AAA: I noticed on the website that you’re both students; is that correct?
NG: Not anymore! I haven’t updated it [the website]. We got our degrees half a year back, and we’re not students anymore. We were together at university, and that’s where we met. That’s where this project started.
AAA: Congratulations on graduating! Hopefully, you both have a little bit more time to work on Potion Tales, not that you’re not trying to juggle university and game development. What did you study?
NG: Fittingly, game development. Here in Germany, now there are a lot of courses doing that, but when we started, it wasn’t much of a thing yet. In Berlin, it was one of the first universities that adopted a game design course.
AAA: I anticipated that might be the answer, considering that you’re working on game development. When you were in school, did your studies influence Potion Tales at all, or did it start out as a student project?
NG: It did start out as a student project, and after it was done, we just decided we’re going to continue on it. So the first iteration of it was, I think, a two-month project. We did a little bit of pre-production before that as well. We mostly worked on it for two months, and it was a really bare-bones version of what can be seen in the free demo on Steam. We worked on it after that, during our studies, and now after finishing our degree as well.
AAA: Creative people often have a lot of different ideas. Did you have any other ideas before you decided to create Potion Tales?
NG: Loads. There’s also a huge backlog of things, and you have a new idea every week. Every week, you’re like, “Should we abandon this and just start on a new project?” That’s the hardest part as a creative person, especially if you’re being creative as a job; you have to let go of so many ideas and things; you have to finish this one other idea.
As I said, this started as a student project. We had to pitch the project ideas to our professor, and I think we prepared four pitches in total, and the professor said, “Yeah, they’re all good; you can pick any.” Which one do you pick? And it was just what did we think, at the time, we would best be able to finish.
AAA: You said you present four pitches, and as a creative person, you have no ideas every week. Do you consider one of those ideas, or one of those pitches, the “game that got away”? Is there something that you want to go back to after you finish Potion Tales?
NG: I am blessed with a very bad memory, so while I can tell you that I made many pitches, I could not tell you what any of them were. I think I have a vague idea of what one of them was because it was a fun idea. I guess that would sort of be the game that got away. But then again, I can still do that when I’m done with Potion Tales.
Also, I think that the idea sounded really fun on paper but also absolutely undoable. Most ideas are, sadly, incredibly undoable and incredibly unlikely to ever be realized. I’m personally bad at recognizing when something is unfeasible. Thankfully, Kathy isn’t, so she can help me let go of absolutely horrendous ideas.
AAA: Did all four pitches include an aspect of potion-making, or was Potion Tales the only potion-making sim game you presented?
NG: That [Potion Tales] was the only potion-making game, but, funnily enough, that year, so many people made potion games. I think when we presented the project at the end, there were four different potion games or something like that.
Every time I talk to people about Potion Tales, they always say, “Do you know Potionomic? Do you know Potion Salad? Do you know Potion Craft?” And all of these titles were announced and came out after we started on Potion Tales, and we’re constantly being asked, “Were you inspired by Potion Craft?” No, it just came along. It’s like you start something, and then, while you work on it, everyone does it! But they’re all wonderful games. We’ve played a lot of them, of course, for reference, and I’m happy for their success.
1,697 games (including Potion Tales) show up when searching for “potion” on Steam.
AAA: Hopefully, all these other potion games that have done well bode well for the future of Potion Tales! So, what games were the inspiration for Potion Tales?
NG: This is going to sound a bit weird, but have you played Inscryption?
AAA: Yes! It’s kind of like a horror card game, right?
NG: Yes. I think we had one person at an event who figured it out and asked us whether we played Inscryption and whether it was an inspiration. I was like, “How did you figure that out?”
That was the last game we played before starting work on Potion Tales, and I think a lot bled over, and you will see that the way you move in Potion Tales is absolutely the same as Inscryption. Like, it’s such a unique way to navigate a world, even though it’s so simple. It’s kind of like old games, in a way. And it came with a lot of advantages because, as opposed to a free camera, we can very much decide what the player looks at, and we can hide stuff. We can present a final image and not worry about what happens if the player crouches down next to the cauldron. They are never going to go out of bounds; it’s literally impossible.
That’s more the technical side. There’s also a game called VA-11 Hall-A, which has a very similar structure in that the story happened somewhere else, and the people just come back to you and tell you what happened. We were also inspired by Coffee Talk.
AAA: You’ve mentioned VA-11 Hall-A, Coffee Talk, and Inscryption. Coffee Talk and VA-11 Hall-A are similar, but Inscryption is in an entirely different category. If you had to ascribe a genre to Potion Tales, what would you describe it as?
NG: A soup game.
AAA: A soup game?
NG: It’s because in the year when we made Potion Tales, during the Game Awards, there were, like, three different game trailers shown where you had to make soup. I don’t quite remember the games (as I said, I have a bad memory). And a lot of people noticed that there was this convergence of games about making soup. They mostly had the same idea of just the coziness of making soup at a campfire.
I’ve always liked calling Potion Tales a “soup game.” I guess the “correct” genre term that’s more widely accepted is “cozy game.”
AAA: As I was playing through the demo, I noticed it does have a lot of aspects of what we would traditionally consider a “cozy game,” but it just feels kind of wrong, calling Potion Tales a “cozy game.”
NG: It’s darker, isn’t it?
AAA: Exactly! “Cozy games” kind of have a very specific art style and a very specific color palette. It has a lot of the mechanics of something cozy, but stylistically it’s a lot different from what most gamers would consider a “cozy game.”
NG: It does add some eeriness to the cozy. I think it’s still cozy. But that might be from me being inside the game for so long, but it’s still cozy in a way. Like your kitchen is cozy, but then where the customer comes from is just this black void, which is not so cozy.
There is a little bit of coziness in this…I don’t want to call it horror because it’s definitely not horror. It’s like camping at the edge of the world. There’s peril, but you’ve got your own little well-lit, nice space with the campfire, and whatever’s out there might be scary, but it’s out there. It’s not here.
AAA: Like I said, we normally associate “cozy” with a specific style, a specific color palette. I really like the art direction and art style of Potion Tales; it’s a really unique style that lends itself really well to the overall theming of the game. Did you take any inspiration from anywhere specific?
NG: Thank you very much. In Potion Tales, you can find some of the very first 3D models I ever did. I partly wanted to do it to learn 3D art. So, I looked at games that had an art style where I thought, “Okay, I can replicate bits of that.” I think the games that I took the most inspiration from were For the King and Deep Rock Galactic, which both have very blocky styles.
AAA: I also really enjoyed the sound design in the game. Who is responsible for the sound?
NG: That’s something I always forget to mention, but that is 100% Kathy’s work for the sound effects. The music is a friend of ours, and he composed the main theme that you can hear throughout the game. I think there are some minor ambient sounds I made. For example, the dialogue sounds, I made them just by crushing appropriate sounds down to bits. The dialogue sound for Lyxlo is actual human talking, just crushed down and shortened.
AAA: I saw on Twitter that you had redesigned Lyxlo. What prompted the redesign?
NG: Several things, really. First and foremost, we just felt that they were a bit boring. In this game, where you have a character who’s a living plant and a character who’s a living flame, and then we had…just a dude, really.
As I said, I’m the main 3D artist for the game, and humans are a really hard thing to do right. So, having a character that is not human it doesn’t look as “wrong.” I think those were the two main things. There’s a lot about the character, as he’s seen in the demo, that we felt didn’t work out quite the way that we wanted.
AAA: I personally thought Lyxlo being a human added to the absurdity of his character, but I’m looking forward to seeing the changes in the full release!
Like I said, I really enjoy the sound design and the extra sound effects make the the game really immersive. Was there a specific conversation when you and Kathy were working on the development of Potion Tales about whether or not to include these extra sound effects?
NG: I don’t think we ever had a conversation; I think we naturally both assumed it. When you’re writing down tasks, those kinds of tasks just appear naturally. I don’t think any of us could imagine a game that doesn’t have these sounds. So, it just felt natural, really.
AAA: I probably spent several minutes just picking things up once I realized that the potion items have different sounds. I didn’t count all the ingredients available; however, I did count all the potions in the demo and noticed there were 23. Do you plan on introducing additional potions in the full release?
NG: No, in fact, the full game will actually have fewer potions because we’re cutting some that are basically just doing the same thing in every scenario. One of the biggest problems in development is that for every single problem that a character presents, you get different solutions based on the potion and that plays out in different storylines.
There are three different storylines, that means now you have to do three things for every potion because there’s three different branches. And then, if that branches again, it’s more and more exponential. That exponential growth is really getting out of hand, and it’s stopped us from making more branches, more stories. Because a new branch means 22 new stories and any given player will just see one of them.
Therefore, if we want to do more branching, if we want to do more interesting stories, we have to cut things that are always the same. For example, I think the Potion of Smoke Breath is being cut because it essentially does the same as the Potion of Invisibility, just differently.
AAA: That touches a little bit on what your website says about how each potion is going to have a special interaction for each customer. From how you’ve explained it, I take that to mean that it’s the case for every single potion for every customer. There’s not going to be some kind of “I don’t want this potion” or other dialogue to guide the player to the correct one?
NG: There is a very, very tiny bit of that in that Lyxlo will not accept failed potions. There’s also not a completely different story branch for every potion, but there are different things that happen, and there is a different interaction with each potion.
AAA: So, there’s not a “correct” potion and a “wrong” potion?
NG: There are different results that you can achieve, and some potions will lead to this result, and some potions will lead to that result. You have to figure out what you want to do. For example, when Rummo comes and asks you to kill someone, some players say, “I don’t want to kill someone.” And that’s a legitimate option, and that’s not wrong as far as the game is concerned; it will just move you to a different branch. If you play through Potion Tales once, you’ve probably seen about 15% of the game.
AAA: That’s great replayability. I’ve only gone through the demo a couple of times so far, but I have already thought, “What would happen if I gave them this other potion instead?” I’m really excited for the full release. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
NG: Play the demo, it’s great! It always helps if someone wishlists a game. We definitely keep track of that, and we’re always really happy for every milestone that we achieve.
The Potion Tales demo is available on Steam. Follow Nighttrain Games on Twitter (@potiontales) and TikTok (@nighttrain.games) for the latest news and announcements. If you’re curious about the gameplay, check out our Let’s Play on YouTube. Happy gaming!
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