The Perils of Narrative Dissonance

I wrote a public review of Potion Permit — it’s up at Press SPACE to Jump — but the lack of narrative resonance in the game deserves a discussion of its own.

Stardew Valley, the Rune Factory series, and Story of Seasons games all resonate with the idea of nurturing. They ask you to spend time and attention on short activities for long-term benefit, nurturing crops and relationships that yield rewards.

Potion Permit abandons the ideas of farming and growth. Instead, you run an infirmary to heal sick patients. You brew potions for healing, and your ingredients are gathered outside of town. 

The potions, and their constant demand for ingredients, turn every day into an extractive rampage. The only limits are your own endurance. The exact same objects will appear in the exact same places the following day, so take everything you can find!

Success is full of tree stumps, crushed rocks, and cut plants.

You can pretend to be a careful ecologist by taking only what you need, but the game mechanics completely ignore any suggestion of an ecological balance. There’s no penalty for stockpiling absurd amounts of raw materials, and you’ll probably need them later. 

This extractive idea of “harvesting” clashes with the story behind your mission to Moonbury: the player is supposed to heal a long-standing rift between the Medical Association and the local villagers. (The association was exiled after a series of mysterious accidents wiped out native plants that were unique to the area around town.)

Spoiler alert: the conflict turns out to be a big misunderstanding. Chemists didn’t cause these problems, but their knowledge can fix them. The ecological disaster sites end up being excuses to brew Potion X and apply it at Location Y. 

Once the native plants are restored, they're additional resources to extract for your potions. It doesn’t feel like a story about healing environmental damage when the gameplay has you unlocking new areas for exploitation.

All this activity is completely removed from the social dynamics of Moonbury and its inhabitants. In fact, they encourage you to extract additional resources to experience the next installment of their story. Getting to know villagers through daily interactions becomes the thing you do to find out what needs to be extracted next.  

Potion Permit ends up feeling like a narrative of colonization and imperial expansion. The capital city, and its bureaucratic medical association, has sent the player to a backwards society that relies on a witch doctor. You are asked to improve that society by looting the surrounding landscape, saving the people from themselves.

I don’t think this colonization theme was intentional! But it’s an interpretation that fits into the spaces left by disjointed narrative design.