Looking as if it’s been torn straight out of an alchemist’s journal, Potion Craft is a gorgeous simulation game that’s sure to appeal to the mystically inclined, although — oddly — it feels like a bad fit on Switch. Arriving on Nintendo's console one year after its PC and Xbox launch, it puts you in the shoes of a 'ye olde' village alchemist running a store and following a daily cycle of harvesting ingredients and crafting with them.

As the alchemist, you may be asked to create potions for farmers, battle mages, hunters, or even something a little darker, like a potion of necromancy. There’s a morality scoring system of sorts. If you serve customers with evil intentions, your morality rating will go down and more ne'er-do-wells will come to you. You’ll need to decide what kind of alchemist you want to be.

Potion Craft's chapter-based gameplay loop is repetitive, but in a way that will feel worthwhile for seasoned simulation fans. You will need to harvest or purchase every individual ingredient, mash them all up, mix them in the right quantities, and heat them up. Following these steps will, in turn, move a potion bottle icon on the map towards different objectives. Different recipes are hidden in between obstacles, and exploration clears away the clouds covering hidden areas.

The game doesn’t change much as you progress. The potions get trickier to find but the act of making them doesn’t get any harder. The customers and vendors are the same every day, but their requests get a little more specific and interesting. The sense of progression here comes from the potion book. There are heaps of potions that can be crafted and they can be customised entirely.

One issue that we ran into during our playthrough is that using the water jug to return the potion bottle to the centre could sometimes cause the game to crash. A memory-related issue, perhaps — we managed to remedy this with a system restart and by deleting quite a few Switch files, but it was frustrating and reset the day’s progress each time that it happened. There are also some hefty loading times to sit through when starting up the game.

Unfortunately, Potion Craft does not feel at home on Switch. While the game certainly has a clear aesthetic appeal, the text is hard to read, the icons are hard to distinguish, and it doesn’t offer any accessibility options of note. The button controls leave a little to be desired, too; we found ourselves playing with the touchscreen for the vast majority of our playthrough. Getting a max-level potion requires you to line up the potion bottles perfectly - and this is very tricky, frustratingly so at times.

Potion Craft is bound to be a gem for the right audience and is ideal for dedicated completionist crafters who enjoy sim games with strategic elements and cosy, magical aesthetics. It's a heady concoction, just one that doesn't go down very well on Switch.