The Apothecary's Assistant

This game is very unusual. It changes based on the calendar day.

The idea is that you are helping out at a shop in a fantasy setting and are paid in acorns. Each calendar day you can earn acorns by completing a task (usually selecting between two pictures based on a description), solve some cryptic crossword clues, and talk to the shop owner. Then there is nothing else you are allowed to do, so you can just wait until the next day.

I had struggled before with completing Ryan Veeder's Authentic Fly Fishing, a game with similar mechanics. Before, I couldn't put a finger on why.

Now I think I know. The issue is that every day I choose for myself the most important things I need to get done. During IFComp, playing a new game is one of those tasks. Finishing a game I'm in the middle of is important, too. But doing a small amount of work in an ongoing task somehow feels less important than starting or finishing, so I shelve it.

Then, days later, I come back to it, not remembering anything. When I play a game all at once or over several days, I immerse myself in it and focus on it, holding all the plot in my head as well as I can. Then I mentally summarize it to myself and let all the rest leak out of my brain, leaving only the summary, and whenever I think of the game, that's what I think of.

With this game and Fly Fishing, I never had a chance to digest the whole game. Because I played out of context each day, I didn't know what was important to remember. So I honestly have no clue how the game started or what the setting exactly is. I think we're in a magical fairy forest and the shopkeeper is a kind of animal, and there was a page given us at one point. But I couldn't say more than that.

Of course I could have looked it up for this review, but I wanted the author to get a glimpse into my deranged mind to see what one player's experience was like.

The cryptic crossword clues were fun, albeit hard (like most such to me). Upon my request, the author made a very helpful visual crossword that made it a bit easier. I also used some online crossword dictionaries, but didn't look at others' hints. The thing that got me most stuck early on was that I was convinced that the clue (Spoiler - click to show)small demon would certainly have (Spoiler - click to show)a different solution each time, and was shocked as I realized today (after two weeks of thinking about it) that that wasn't so.

Overall, the game is creative and polished, and provides interactivity that's engaging. Due to its format, I struggled to hold onto a summary of the plot in my mind.

The game also had a charity donation segment, but I'm not including that in my score, as I wouldn't want it to become a trend for games to get upvoted based on financial donations the author makes (or to get downvoted for not doing so). I don't think it's bad, I just think it should be separate from the scoring system.

Note: This review was written during IFComp 2024, and originally posted in the authors' section of the intfiction forum on 9 Sep 2024.

This is a time-lapse game to be played over a number of days (don’t have to be successive), where you take on a job as an assistant in an apothecary’s shop, and aim to work a minimum number of shifts over the coming weeks. Along the way you are given light puzzles to solve, as well as a series of cryptic puzzles.

Initially I was puzzled by how time worked in the game. But found if I closed the browser tab and reloaded it on a later day it would move the game on, and let me play another session in the shop. There isn’t an advance time facility within the game interface eg a “go to next day” link you can click. Instead you need to open it afresh in your browser. Reloading an existing browser tab didn’t work for me.

Note apparently you are supposed to be able to play more than once a day, but I could never get this to work on my Mac.

The tasks that you are given by the shopkeeper are fairly easy spot tasks. Though some would be a problem for visually impaired people. The author hopes to fix that.

I was not expecting the cryptic crossword puzzles to pop up. I am not good at cryptic crossword puzzles! Over time you are given multiple pages of them to optionally solve. Helpfully the game links to a page of advice/tips/techniques/practice for solving such puzzles. And, surprisingly, I got quite adept at them! I did encounter a slight bug in Safari on my Mac, and in iOS browsers, but the author fixed this after my original review, which is great. Getting things working fully reliably on Safari (all versions) and iOS browsers can be extra complicated.

I was happy with the quasi ending I reached. Though I think I’d have preferred to play the game over a much shorter period. Repeated daily tasks like Wordle don’t generally appeal to me. And I felt constrained by the need to come back repeatedly over a long time. It also made it harder to remember plot elements from earlier days on returning. However the world is charming, and the tasks that you are given to do are satisfying.

The game has a built in mechanism for gifting to charity, where you can optionally gift some of your in-game earnings to several real world causes. A nice touch.

I suppose it’s my fault for not starting earlier, but I wished I’d seen more of the rat. He(?)'s the familiar of the eponymous apothecary, and my first shift working at the store involved helping out with the stockroom; the little fellow(?) was quite a lovable and useful assistant’s assistant, tracking down inventory and speeding up the process so much that I was looking forward to spending more time with him(?) But he hasn’t turned up after ten more days of playing the game, which is why the details are beginning to fade (I think his(?) name started with a D but don’t quote me on it) – given that the game’s events are tied to the real-world calendar and clock, I suspect the cute rat was front-loaded into the first week or two of the Comp to help bring in the lookie-lous.

At the risk of over-interpreting an anecdote, my rodent-related forgetfulness maybe stands for the broader way the real-time element of The Apothecary’s Assistant often overshadows its cozy, cottagecore vibe. Whenever you first launch it, I believe you get the same vignette where you stumble through the woods into Aïssatou’s shop of balms and curiosities, and quickly agree to help from time to time in return for a payment of acorns (you also trip over a sheet of cryptic-crossword clues on your way out; more on those later). But then you’re told to come back tomorrow to start a shift, and tomorrow is tomorrow – until your patch of ground rotates around the earth’s axis to greet the sun once more, all there is to do is ask a single question of Aïssatou or noodle over the cryptics (we’ll get there). You can also use your accumulated acorns to purchase one of several beads, each of which is linked to a particular real-world charity; in a generous touch, the author’s planning to make actual donations out of their Colossal Prize winnings from last year’s Comp, with each player-selected acorn translating to an additional $1.

The main interest of the game is thus in the daily shifts (though turns out some days you can get up to three of them, depending on the shop’s schedule). While each vignette is unique, there are several kinds that recur: you’ll be tasked to find a creature or plant for Aïssatou, which requires matching the description you’ve gotten with one of a pair of drawings; or pick out which of chartreuse, burgundy, or mustard is a shade of red for a befuddled customer; or a Mad Libs bit where you read a story to entertain a customer’s kid – making sure all the words you plug in start with the letter “v” is entirely optional, but I enjoyed that self-set challenge.

There are plenty of one-offs, too (though of course some of them might ultimately prove to have sequels), but they all hit that same low-key, comforting vibe: they set a mood, present the smallest imaginable quantum of challenge, then after a few hundred words they send you on your way, 60 acorns richer (you get 50 just for showing up, and a bonus 10 if you get things right, which so far I’ve accomplished 100% of the time). But if you’re feeling like you want something more robust to chew on, well, that’s where the cryptics have you covered. You ultimately stumble across more than half a dozen clues to work through, and while the average individual difficulty is perhaps a bit lower than what you’d see in a professional cryptic crossword, the fact that they’re given individually, rather than interlocking in a grid, means that you can’t rely on the easier clues filling in letters for the harder ones. Still, they’re eminently fair, and the slow pace of the rest of the game meant I was able to nibble at them a little at a time, only needing to consult the forum hint thread for one I’d gotten my head wrapped the wrong way around.

Your reward for solving them all is a bonanza of acorns, and the most dramatic scene in the game – several of Aïssatou’s former assistants, who had some kind of falling out with her, reveal that they’ve been behind the clues as part of a scheme to get her to reconsider her actions. It’s well-written, but I have to confess that if there were earlier hints seeding that something like this had happened, I didn’t pick up on them, and I have to further confess that since the gimmick of this review has me writing this sentence like two weeks on, most of what I now remember about the scene is not remembering its context.

All of which is to say that while I quite like each element of the Apothecary’s Apprentice – the cozy shopkeeping, the gentle challenges, the fairytale cast, the charity element, and the cryptic crossword – and think the real-time structure is a neat thing to play with in the context of a Comp that’s running over a specified number of real-world days, for me it wound up being slightly less than the sum of its parts. A low-stakes magic-shop simulator that you could binge all at once would work gangbusters, I think, as would a slow-paced real-time game that presented a high-intensity plot and dramatic, engaging characters. But the combination of low-key hangout vibes and short play sessions with big gaps between them made for an awkward combination that’s left me with positive feelings but not many real stand-out moments. And as with this review, which I’ve written a single sentence at a time over the course of two weeks without looking back at anything I previously wrote besides the last few words of the previous one to guide me, there’s a slight wooliness and lack of momentum to the whole, even as each individual piece is pleasant and well put together.

For all that, I’ve still been going back each day to earn some supernumerary acorns (I’ve long since purchased all the beads), and I’ll be interested to see whether the long-teased arrival of the Hunter’s Moon will bring the story to a climax that might reconfigure how I’ve felt about it to date. I also can’t help but wonder whether the exact same structure and approach would have worked much better if I hadn’t played it in the middle of the Comp, with dozens of other stories and characters jostling the gentle Apothecary’s Assistant crew out of my brain’s limited attention span. As experiments go, then, it’s certainly a worthwhile one, and one I’ve definitely enjoyed, even as I wish more of it had stuck with me.