Potion Lab for Ren'Py is my complete rewrite of the original game by Undercoversam.
I did the "remake" because I wanted a bit of visual media... Then it quickly escalated extremely...
So there's now a 'Potion Lab' game full of graphic scenes, varying background music and a lot of sound effects.
I hope you'll enjoy playing it :)
Game Mechanic and Texts are as close as possible to the original game:
Download packages: V2.3 comes in multiple builds, choose the one you need:
! NEW FEATURES !
This Version introduces a new 'Custom game mode' including the 'Antidote challenge', inspired by RSKappa7's constructive game review on V2.1 (see the 'Plot' tab for more info).
IMPORTANT when updating the game to a newer version on Windows or Linux platform:
If you extract the new game version to a different/new folder, make sure you copy the "ending_history" folder from your old "game" directory to the new one!
This is neccessary for converting the history storage method to support MacOS and Android too!
If you don't copy those contents, you WILL LOSE all the entries in endings gallery on first start, but that's not a problem to solve: close the game, copy the ending_history folder, open the game again.
You are an apprentice working for a wizard named Merlin.
When a potion mishap changes you into a girl, you have to create the antidote under a time limit. You will have to combine different potions, undergoing their various transformative effects, to find the right ingredients to make the antidote. Otherwise, you'll spend the rest of your life with these changes.
There are three basic endings as well as a bunch of other 'special' endings which depend on the transformation combinations and other things.
When you start a new game, you have the choice of running the regular game or start a custom game where you can tweak almost anything which affects the engine logic.
Running a custom game therefore is as much freedom to the player as possible. All the endings except the Slimegirl are possible (which still is locked to the "hard" regular game difficulty for reasons).
Feel free to give it a try - almost anything is possible including cranking the deadline up to infinity (666 days, of course, which is as good as infinite).
Note: finished games in custom mode will not be stored to your Endings Gallery!
When starting a custom game, you have the opportunity to enable the "Challenge Mode".
This mode is Win-Or-Lose only (all endings disabled). The Goal is not to find the antidote mixture, since you have it at the beginning.
Instead the game tries to mess up your body with a bunch of transformations. Your task will be to try to "revert" that until your body is as close as possible back to your male human form before the antidote will do it's job to switch your body back to the state it was before.
Do this within your self set timelimit to win the challenge, otherwise accept what happens if you lose.
You - An apprentice wizard who just wants to prove his ability to make potions.
Merlin - Your mentor who never lets you practice with potions or magic. He's out for the weekend.
There's no direct character interaction except you interacting with yourself :)
But there are several locations in the game to interact with (Your Bedroom, Laboratory Table, Potion shop, Restoration Center, Black Cat Pub, Salesman).
If you're interested in a variety of alternative Endings:
Check the game status screen and hover your mouse over the requirements column to see details for specific endings.
Hint: It's required not to find the antidote sometimes :)
By searching the lab you possibly find some hints in Merlin's notes.
Regarding a hint to potion colors: You can direct the group of transformation by the first mixture color, but be aware that the chosen transformation effect still depends on your current preference (which might change) and randomness.
This Version introduces a new 'Custom game mode' including the 'Antidote challenge', inspired by *RSKappa7*'s constructive game review on V2.1 (see the 'Plot' tab for more info).
Basically V2.0 is the first release of a complete game rewrite from scratch. I tried to be as close as possible (99% I guess) to the original game speaking of gameplay mechanic and text blocks.
I did the "remake" because I wanted a bit of visual media... Then it quickly escalated extremely...
So there's now a 'Potion Lab' game full of graphic scenes, varying background music and a lot of sound effects.
I hope you'll enjoy playing it :)
In the original game, only the bunny mutation could get legless.
I Think this was a "gameplay tuning" restriction.
I now changed this so any of the 3 human forms could have their legs removed completely, but not by accident, you have to brew a known "Leg removal recipe" to achieve this.
Brewing unknown potion would disable the leg removal if you only have 2 of them.
As a remake, I think this version is perfetly fine. AI generated art is still very polarizing, but I hope that the ability to have a computer handle the multiple variations of character model will allow for an expanded set of images and combinations with a lot less effort on the developer's part. I appreciate the visual update, and can only hope that a future one might include a bit more customiation for the player model.
I think there could be some improvements in the interface. Separating some menus is unintuitive, with a lack of ability to reference past potion experiments or recipes when you go to actually brew being probably the first place in need of help. A larger part of the interface for the time system, stress and mental states is likely needed, maybe a side bar with larger images instead of a bottom row tucked in the corner implementation. I'd advocate for having the paperdoll on such a side bar as well, but mostly because it would help me keep track of how screwed over my character is at the moment.
Overall I find this remake solid and a welcome attempt at upgrading the game to visuals, thanks to the creator for their time spent doing so.
With regards to the game it's remaking:
Potion Lab always suffered from two things I think, and this version carries those flaws.
1st it fights itself (as all games treating transformation as a loss do). You spend your time searching for a cure, not really experimenting much with actual potion making, and the cure just wipes out all your changes. An interesting 'challenge' mode would be if you had to move yourelf to a target state, either your original transformed state (so undo all your potion changes from discovery phase) or something as close to a man as you can (one set of tiny breasts, certain level of height, maybe muscle growth) before the antidote would work. It would at least give you cause to try to figure out other potion combinations to undo or alter your form as needed.
2nd is the actual potion logic. As in there really isn't much. There's some notes occasionally that Red affects body more, or Yellow adds randomness, but in the end you're playing a game about figuring out a correct code, and not a game about figuring out how potion order and colors work. This means you won't usually say things like, "Oh a Red-Yellow potion will affect breast size, so I need to figure out the sequence of potions at the end which will result in an increase or decrease". You instead just look at your list and say, "3 of my last potions were correct, I'll vary the one in slot 4 and see if the number changes." After which you'll get an effect seemingly unrelated to your last potion.
Overall it can still be fun to throw down a few random rolls, see what happens, and then see if you can recover, but the replayability is pretty solidly meh unless you actively chase endings. In my wish list of things that could be great would be a lot more interactions based off form changes (Mermaid tails to let you go swimming and retrieve ingredients, spider legs to allow you to spin silk to sell, Rabbit traits letting you traverse faster, cat letting you sort piles faster) Giving those major transformations benefits, maybe even longer term benefits like being able to upgrade/talk to/discover things would give you an incentive to explore transformations beyond personal curiosity, with a strategy sort of depending on your starting form and how close you would be to unlocking some additional benefit.
But that's way outside the scope of the remake, and more a criticism leveled at the original game.
This is an interesting one; you don't see too many games built in Ren'py that have this much variation in the transformations. Artwork is a bit of a mixed bag, mostly because some of the transformations on the model don't mesh well, like the child-bearing hips and (ironically) pregnancy. And this may just be me being dense, but I'm not sure I understand the potion system, specifically finding the cure; when the game drops hints about which ingredients you got right, I'm not clear on whether I got them in the right order or just got the right potions in the mix, and when I think I've figured it out, I try a new combination and get fewer correct hits than before. Also, the stress management system is a little unintuitive, and I'd like to see some visuals for the sex scenes. Hopefully these are things that can be addressed as development goes forward.
Having gotten my (fairly mild) complaints out of the way, there's a lot to like about this. I love the aspect of discovery in trying to find the cure potion and the character making their situation even worse in trying to resolve it. I particularly like the use of voice clips, with the protagonist groaning or screaming in frustration when they mutate themselves further instead of fixing their condition. More games should make use of little bits of voice work like that, and it works great here. I also like the inclusion of a tracker to tell you what endings you're on course for in the status screen; it gives you enough information to manipulate things to try and hit any endings you haven't gotten yet.
All in all, there's a great foundation to build on here. With some polish and tweaks, I think this could easily become one of my favorite games on the site. Keep up the great work!
I'm a bit torn on this one. I do like the original game, flaws and all, as a nice classic from back in the day with a decent amount of replayability. Finding the actual solution isn't hard, but finding all the endings can be a decent little challenge. This is a mechanical replica of that, with no tweaks to the formula, with the one addition being graphics.
And that's the rub. The graphics aren't great, really. It's a mix of AI generated art of backgrounds and what appears to be a series of custom renders for the player. The AI art is riddled with all the usual flaws of that system and often don't fit the theme of the game at all. The intro in particular has a significant grinding of gears. I thought I was helping out some doddering, perverted wizard with a local potion shop, not helping a disfigured warlock and his similarly hideous collegues with nether portals. And the art for the character is both rather ugly and also hilarously out of proportion. All of the cup sizes are incredibly inflated from what the text describes them as, as do the wider hip options. Some of the changes don't result in any graphics at all, which is a bit of a shame but that's at least somewhat undestandable due to the number of renders that would be needed to account for every possible variation. Still, with the pitch of this being "Potion Lab with graphics", it's a shame that it doesn't live up to that.
Ultimately, I'd consider the original game, despite being text only, a better experience overall. Making this rather redundant. However, with better graphics, this might still be worth your time, so keep an eye on it if the graphics are improved in the future.
A faithful recreation of the original all the way down to recreating it's myriad of flaws.
At the core of the potion lab's gameplay is a classical combination puzzle. As with all the classical puzzles, if you weren't done with it way back in school than you've either missed out on it somehow or you just aren't into mental activities.
If you did miss out, well … you're in luck – there are better way to catch up on it than this game.
Puzzles thrive in clear environment and this game provides anything but that.
You'll drown in excess menus (example – your combination history and new combination input are on two different screens for some unfathomable reason) you'll have to manually check your status all the time (example - the game never bothers to tell you that you've reached a detrimental level of stress until you actually stumble into a detriment, nor does it tell you how much stress you've gained after an action) and figure many other minute details through trial and error (example – a transformation tells you that it'll now take you longer to brew potions. How much longer? Nope, not telling, it's not like that's important or anything, right?).
The game is also not particularly configurable. For example you can increase it's length to 3 days if you drop the difficulty down, but you can't have a longer game with the same difficulty (you know, by also increasing the base puzzle difficulty to match the longer period).
Which is a big issue because this is a TF game and in the process of normally solving the set puzzle you're not going to run into a lot of TFs. Actually you're gonna miss most of them. Unless you intentionally delay finding the cure. And that would be the last and most important nail in this game's coffin.
You can't say there's nothing in it, but regardless of what it does have in it, it's a fact that this game will pull all the stops to prevent you from enjoying it.
If it's ever reworked to deal with the above issues I'd recommend giving it a try.
As is I recommend giving it a hard pass.
The faces man. Jesus christ.
