Fantastic shopkeeping and potion-brewing game I didn't know I was missing in my life. In short, a very fun shopkeeping game focusing on time/money management with a great deckbuilding minigame for actually selling each potion.

In detail:

Potionomics has lots of functional gameplay parts blended into one cute, streamlined, enjoyable bundle. One big focus is the haggling minigame where you use haggling techniques on cards to increase interest/price for each potion you sell. It plays like Slay the Spire style card combat, though instead of roguelike deckbuilding, you get better cards by improving relationships with people in the main fantasy town of Rafta. It has a good amount of variable strategies already, and by the end of the game, you'll have a powerful deck built with all the best haggling technique cards from all your friends in Rafta.

Potion brewing is another main gameplay focus, as you have to brew the potions yourself to sell in the haggling minigame. It is quite fun figuring out the best way to both make money and continue the main story by making particularly tricky and powerful potions for Potion Competitions. You have to find a good balance of getting enough ingredients to keep selling potions in the haggling minigame, as well as investing money into upgrading your shopfront and cauldrons and giving potions to adventurers who can find rare ingredients you'll need for your best and most profitable potions.

While you are tracking down all your ingredients, you'll be meeting more than a dozen unique, beautifully animated townsfolk of various professions. Each character offers different things that can help you running your shop, and the more time you spend with them, the better things they will offer you. Almost all of them are romanceable too! This evokes feelings of the Persona series like Persona 5, where I had time to max out my relationships with many people but not everyone.

This means I got to enjoyably strategize which characters I wanted to spend the most time with, having to choose between my seedy and mysterious ingredients witch, to my gorgeous but oblivious hero's guild leader, or the shy but powerful adventurer who fights monsters to get my rare ingredients. These tender moments you share with these helpful people are absolutely one of the best parts of this game. They are all just so thoughtfully drawn and animated that spending time with them feels as relaxing and heartwarming as a cup of hot cocoa and a warm blanket at home on a rainy day. The more time with them you spend, the more benefits they will offer your store, and more powerful cards they will unlock for your haggling deck.

Additionally, each character has a strategic theme to the cards they give to you, like more card draw, or stronger defensive cards, or recklessly powerful cards that hit hard but give the customers defensive buffs after your turn ends. This means for those who love deckbuilding games, you can focus on characters who give you the strategic card theme you like, and use that to sell potions for greatly increased profit in the haggling minigame.

To wrap up, this is a wonderful potion shop game where you'll get to sell all sorts of cures and tonics for big profits, and meet many friends (and lovers) who will help you to become the best potion shop that the town of Rafta has ever seen. Highly recommend if you like deckbuilding and shop simulators and even if you've never played something like that before, it's one of the best I've ever played.