Miracle Merchant is a quite simple puzzle game about brewing potions using cards from four colored decks in order to meet the specific requirements of your stylish clients and get enough points on each turn to continue until you eventually run out of cards. To make things more difficult, you have cursed cards that remove points when you play them - but you sometimes need to - and a few more special cards effects to consider in order to maximize your potion-brewing capabilities. I had a good time with this game, feeling like the great core mechanics weren’t supplemented by enough meat around the bone.
The game goes as thus, you have clients coming in, requesting a potion with a specific ingredient from one of five colors (they can request cursed ingredients as well) and a bonus ingredient that they like. You use the top cards from your four colored decks to make a potion that includes the required ingredient and that is worth enough points. Some cards give you bonus points if they are placed adjacent to a specific color, others won’t need them to be adjacent. You have to use four cards per customer, so it’s a balancing act between getting a ton of points and keeping your cards for the upcoming customers. You’ll lose if you make a potion without the required ingredient, a potion with a value of 0 or less, or if you run out of cards. You can send customers back to the end of the line if you’re in a tight spot, but I haven’t used that much. To make matters complicated are the 3 randomly shuffled ‘cursed’ ingredients in each deck, which will reduce your score.
My only issue with the game is that this is all there is to it. You have some missions that you can try to accomplish - they are mostly related to brewing specific kinds of potions - but they don’t give anything, there’s no persistent progression and you’re not unlocking better cards, more challenging customers or anything of the like. You just play the same game with the same parameters over and over again. Which isn’t that big of a deal because of course, not all games need to have these mechanics, but I enjoyed the core gameplay, so I kinda wish it did!
If you want a relaxing little puzzle game with a great art style and some fairly simple mechanics to grasp, Miracle Merchant is absolutely one of these. I’m quite glad I tried it! Give it a shot as well!
