Potionomics, the gorgeous deck-building sim, just got a new patch that fixes my issues with it. It also includes voice acting and an option to kiss everyone in one playthrough.

Potionomics was a game I loved when it was released in 2022. PC Gamer also liked it, as we gave it 87 points in our Potionomics Review. If you missed it, this delightful gem is a shop simulation by Voracious Games that's about inheriting debt and a potion store. It handles selling potions and competing in competitions via deckbuilding. The protagonist gains new sales tactics by interacting with other players, then sells her wares through Slay the Spire style battles.

It's a truly gorgeous little thing. It's a genuinely gorgeous little thing. Alas, it had a few key problems when I played it that stopped me from finishing my playthrough--problems that are now thoroughly fixed via a major update that dropped yesterday.

Potionomics, a game that is all about time management, had a strange friction where you could get into a death spiral similar to XCOM if you wasted time in the early days. This was a great way to keep players engaged, but it also meant that new players often spent a few hours before realizing they were screwed. Now you can choose the difficulty level at any time.

Potionomics' ending always bothered me because of the time limit. It was mostly in the fact that it ended. It had a Persona-style cutoff date, where the credits rolled and that was it. This would have been a good way to structure the game if it were a short one, but I hadn't finished my playthrough. I'd already sunk 30 hours into it. There's now an endless mode available after the story is finished. This allows you to tie up all your romance arcs.

I was also frustrated by the romance options in the game because of this long playtime, which is a good thing in any other situation. Potionomics has a lot of well-written, lovely characters. But you can only kiss one of them in a playthrough, and that's despite the fact that these playthroughs take dozens of hours. It was awful. You can now be as polyamorous or monogamous as you like.

I haven't even mentioned the most important feature of all, which is voice acting! Below is an example. While this trailer for "Masterwork Edition", cites consoles as the target audience, all of the new features are free updates for the Steam Version.

The developers added voice acting for the major story cutscenes two years after the game was released. If you don't mind, I will sit here and pull my non-existent strands of hair over how to spend the very limited time I have, as I am knee deep in Metaphor ReFantazio, which is really very good, soon to play Dragon Age The Veilguard, but I just added a Potionomics Playthrough to my list. I don't expect to be going outside for some time.