One Potion Please! ★★★★☆

Papers, Please as a light­hearted trans­form­ation kink game. You are a potion seller tasked with spik­ing the health potions of various dungeon crawl­ing ad­ventur­ers with various fetish trans­form­ation effects in order to impede their pro­gress in the dun­geon. Warriors get breast ex­pansion potions to impede their sword swings, unless they are fighting beholders (which would get too distracted by their inflated tits to fight back any longer), while thieves get butt ex­pansion potions such that the clap from their ass cheeks alerts nearby guards. A sentence which sums up the tone, humour, mechanics and process of playing the game quite well.

It does not take itself seriously, but every day new rules are added that the player must update their mental checklist and story events provide temporary twists on the potion formula (sometimes literally) and bespoke little adventure game puzzles to solve which offer some fun and inventive highlights to each day. Many of the rules interact with each other and have various exceptions to them, creating an engaging but not particularly taxing mental loop and I appreciated having something like that to occupy me recently when I was not feeling up to anything more mentally strenuous. Unlike Papers, Please there is usually no time pressure so you can consider your options carefully, and consequences for failure are generally a slapstick death followed by getting to immediately restart the day. The game will also offer to give you the solution to any puzzle that has caught you out. Some potions do get more developed rules for them than others, and one of the more layered ones has a facet of its instructions permanently circumvented by a later potion such that it becomes irrelevant for the rest of the game (but is never removed from the reminder tooltip) which I think is a shame.

The game in general is a bit jank and a more refined version would be nice, but it’s three quid at full price from a solo developer so I am willing to forgive a lot and grade it on a curve. Audio stands out as an area that could immediately use more attention. There’s no music and only minimal stock sound effects for everything else. A lot about its presentation and style reminds me of playing Newgrounds games of yore to the point where it throwing in a reference to Wayne Radio TV feels like an anachronism, but no this game is made in Godot, not Flash, and was released only a few months ago.

I don’t generally find the actual kink stuff particularly hot, but I do find it funny and charming. Kinks are somewhat inherently ridiculous and I appreciate the way it plays with them in silly ways while still trying to be sexy. Everything is kept quite lighthearted and the adventurers, who do get their own storylines and developing relationships as time goes on, are never traumatised by being repeatedly bimbofied, killed by slimes and revived back at the town square, but will just grumble about the impracticalities of trying to lug around breasts the size of beachballs as workplace annoyance—and of course many of them are simply into it anyway. The adventurers are, predictably, all women and the worldbuilding excuse offered for this¹ also offhandedly implies that a lot of them are probably trans, which I enjoy. Skee, a skeleton who takes on a more and more feminine appearance across the course of the game through the gathering powerful dark magical artefacts, also feels like a very trans character.

Fun little thing, very cheep, and the demo has more than half of the story mode in it if you want to try it for free.