Halloween may be a few months away but that won’t stop every ghost and goblin from creeping over to check out all the enchanted goodies at the Mystic Emporium. Join Lilly as she sells her bubbling potions and mystical bobbles to everything from wizards to ogres in this fun and challenging time management game. So grab your cauldron and bring your bottle of eyes because it’s potion making time!

Mystic Emporium’s storyline focuses on a young witch named Lilly who’s fresh off a job at a magical library and looking to open her own magic shop. Luckily for Lilly, she finds an older magic store owner that’s looking to sell her magic shop to someone else so she can travel the world. So under the guise of this previous store owner, Lilly buys the store and jumps into the wonderful adventure that is magic shop ownership.

Each day, you must help Lilly sell a variety of enchanted objects to spooky customers like ogres, wizards, witches. While you’re selling your wares, you will have a time limit and a money goal to achieve within the time limit in order to pass the level. You will also have an expert money goal to achieve if you wish to master the level and achieve some trophies later in the game. As each customer comes into the store, they will have one or more item symbols above their heads to indicate what they want you to make. They will also have a happy meter which will drop as they get impatient.

Lilly’s store items don’t come ready to sell. Potions are made by pulling the required recipe from your book into your cauldron in order to see what ingredients you need to make it. The ingredients can then be picked up two at a time and dropped into the cauldron for mixing. Once everything is in the cauldron, Lilly can click underneath the brew to light the fire and wait for everything to come to a boil. This completes the potion and Lilly can finally serve it.

Like most good time management games, you can cue up moves in advance, and even move spells into the cauldrons while performing other tasks.

Other items like enchanted artifacts have to be enchanted first before they can be handed over to a customer, and that can be done by clicking on them to have Lilly wave her wand on them for a moment. Once gone, the artifact must be replaced by clicking on it to have Octavos appear with the new item. Finally, magical berries must be grown by feeding specific ingredients to the pot in your store.

Improvements for your store, which include items to keep customers happier, serve them faster, and store more objects, can be purchased in between levels that will help you complete levels easier.

Between some levels, Lilly will get a chance to play a mini-game in order to win charms that help her do things like earn higher tips. This mini-game has you matching colored symbols in order to fill mana potions of the same color. Strangely, the mini-game is “sponsored” by the real-life energy drink Mana Potion.

The graphics of this game are quite nice in the bright and colourful time management kind of way. Sound and music suit the game, and you can play your own music in conjunction with the sound effects.

Mystic Emporium comes with 24 levels that can be completed within a couple of hours, and there aren’t that many things to upgrade in the shop. The content feels limited in comparison to other games of the same genre. Mystic Emporium is like many sim plays, but it has its own magical charm and witchy appeal especially for Harry Potter fans. The play is easy to learn, the artwork bright and colorful, and the game is enjoyable.

Pros:

• Challenging levels with increasing difficulty.
• Whimsical graphics and cute characters.
• Interesting potion-mixing element and mana potion mini-game.

Cons:

• Some objects require precise clicking.
• Hard to get Expert on some levels.
• Looped music can get annoying.

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