When the temperature drops, my serotonin reserves follow suit. What was once an easy weekly routine turns into chore molasses. I struggle to wade through the smallest tasks. So I chase that fantasy into games. A straightforward list of tasks, the promise of exponential progress, a fictional community—small pieces of my mental bedrock. Something familiar. Something new. A cozy game void that Potionomics and Trash Goblin might fill.
But even genre coziness has its borders. Potionomics: Masterwork Edition builds a friendly scaffolding around regimented potion brewing, while Trash Goblin (currently in Early Access) takes a looser approach to procuring goods. Both games stayed in my mental orbit like nearby moons, influencing the pull of one another.
Getting Ratioed
Related: Magical Delicacy First Impressions: Cooking Up A Storm
Potionomics: Masterwork Edition is instantly charming. Sylvia inherits her uncle’s dilapidated potion shop, powering through despite inheriting a crushing amount of debt with it. The potion shop and the island it’s nested on slowly unfurls with time. Dialogue pops, characters move and emote in outsized ways, and everything has just the right amount of clutter.
Brewing potions isn’t as cozy game coded as the rest of the game suggests. Each potion ingredient is made of magimins—elemental particles sorted into five different types. Successful brewing requires a strict ratio of magimins. Ordinary potions stick to a 1:1 ratio between two magimin types.
But the more complex brewing has more complicated spreads between three. Higher-value ingredients attach attributes to your potion that’ll affect quality and sale price, for better or for worse.
Sylvia needs to juggle running a profitable shop with getting to know the townsfolk and competing in the required potion brewing contests to avoid becoming homeless. On normal difficulty, brewing potions, traveling, and participating in social events moves the game clock forward.
No Team in Potionomics
I floundered with time management at first, but then settled into a nice groove. I sent local hero Mint on expeditions, gave flying merchant Quinn any new ingredients, and started flirting with Muktuk, the burly walrus blacksmith. Every small interaction gave me a new card to negotiate with customers or furniture for my shop. I loved being the city’s social little butterfly.
But I dreaded the potion brewing itself. I understood how everything worked—sort out ingredients by magimin ratio, get higher quality stuff, brew nicer potions—but it felt like the dreariest part of the game. But as the first contest loomed, I was nowhere near the recommended potion quality. What was I doing wrong?
I briefly considered adjusting the difficulty to remove time constraints altogether, but that wouldn’t solve the core issue: potion brewing just wasn’t for me. There wasn’t the self-guided discovery of Atelier games or the tongue-in-cheek routine of Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale. Potionomics: Masterwork Edition charted exciting new territory by merging cutthroat and cozy game, but I couldn’t bring myself to keep brewing.
Goblin Mode
I switched to Trash Goblin with more than a little apprehension, but quickly found my stride. You are a goblin who’s recently been taken under the wing of Aimon, a local shopkeeper. They entrust you with their small trinket shop, coaching you through the first few days of business.
Your goblin’s domain consists of four screens: the shopkeeper’s desk, your workbench, the customer desk, and the personal space where you sleep. Four corners of a single room. The small space and first person perspective lends some immediacy. Nothing about the small shop feels claustrophobic, just lovingly lived in.
Townsfolk have a whole spectrum of reactions upon seeing the shop; one anthropomorphic frog simply dismisses you out of hand, not even buying anything before storming off. Then, there will be customers who are simply looking to solve their own problems.
Non-scripted requests follow a template, but even that can lead to delight. Eight or nine days in, a bearded man approached me in a hurry. “I need a bedpan. Don’t care what condition.” Was he… was he about to shit himself? Thankfully, I already had a clean bedpan in stock. Eat your fiber, kids.
Simple and Clean
Trash Goblin’s method of business is sourcing trinkets from an endlessly refilling bag and cleaning them on your workbench. Each task takes a unit of time on the clock, but in the early stages this time constraint is pretty flexible.
Once the day’s clock has run out, you can no longer work at the bench. Customers are pretty patient if you haven’t found their item, so tipping over from one day into another carries no consequences (yet).
First, you’ll need to determine what the current item is by removing any debris. You inspect each item by rotating it with your mouse buttons. Your chisel chips away at blocks of dirt or rock, each type with its own set of rules.
Simple dirt crumbles easily, but golden-brown blocks take a few more strikes. Glass blocks shatter across the entire chain with one tap, while purple crystal formations only break when hit at the right angle. Each item gets labeled after the debris removal process. One day I revealed four hairpins in a row, much to my chagrin.
After identifying a piece, next is cleaning it. Clicking and dragging works up a lather, clearing away any rust or surface grime. A meter on the right helpfully shows what percentage I’ve cleaned. Scrubbing each piece felt tactile and meditative, like a PowerWash Simulator session at micro scale. And the sound effects lulled me into blissful silence, often startling me when the item label popped in upon completion.
Wear and Tear
Early customers want standard items, but later portions of Trash Goblin require fusing them together. Soon the local blacksmith gifts you an upcycling tool as thanks for an urgent job. Now you can attach trinkets to each other at predefined spots. My first upcycler job was reuniting a beer stein with its handle.
Further progression unlocks shop customization. Items range from the silly (a World’s Best Non-Boss mug for Aimon) to multifunctional. Adding more shelves and tables to your shop means you can start devising a makeshift sorting system outside of your item ledger. Trash Goblin goes the extra mile to make sure the space and the task at hand are yours to shape.
Finding My Kind of Cozy Game
Potionomics: Masterwork Edition and Trash Goblin helped me examine my prickly relationship with cozy games through their mechanics. I was taken aback by my response, to be frank. Often self-described cozy games come off as a little too treacly, but I stumbled into two radically different approaches.
Although I couldn’t see Potionomics through to the end, I deeply respected its hard check approach to shopkeeping. The scaffolding around potion making—negotiating cards for customers, relationships with townsfolk, a slowly building ingredients list—might lure in those with different playstyles. While cut-and-dry ingredient ratios weren’t exactly what I was after, I was still charmed by Potionomics’ style.
Trash Goblin delighted me with its willingness to get hands-on. Uncovering and cleaning each item was all the momentum I needed to press forward through its more free-form campaign. And fusing items together adds a whole layer of experimentation that I’ve loved since the 3DS’s Style Savvy: Fashion Forward.
And maybe my New Year’s Resolution should involve reexamining my knee-jerk reaction to cozy game presentation. If these two titles alone have systemic intrigues brewing, there could be countless games just waiting to bubble to the surface.
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