I've been playing
Potions: A Curious Tale from Stumbling Cat on Steam... It's disguised as a silly little young-adult magical-schoolgirl game, but it's actually a fairly entertaining oldschool-NES-style lite-rpg...
I originally bought it just to support the independent creator (It's only $20) thinking I'd probably only ever play it once, but that first time lasted almost three hours...
I've got almost ten hours into it so far, spread out over about six or seven sessions, and it's a seriously addictive time waster. Well worth the money I threw at it.
If you have young-teen children, this is definitely a game they'll enjoy.
It's all about going around gathering ingredients to make potions that you use to fight monsters and solve problems on your quests. The artistic style of the graphics is simple and retro (it's a "magical girl" game) but fairly pretty. New potion recipes are largely learned through experimentation, and some ingredients are much rarer and more powerful than others. There are something like 80 different potions and it's possible to accidentally create a bottle of useless sludge. Gameplay is simple, but also challenging enough that it's not boring (it's easy to miss a moving target when throwing a potion): you have eight inventory slots which can only hold up to ten of that type of potion, and there are quite a few potions with widely different effects (some push back, or cause targets to catch fire for a few turns, or leave rocks behind that change the dynamics of the battlefield) so you need to put some thought into your loadout for each mission.
There are a lot of places where you need to come back to that location after unlocking certain things elsewhere or discovering the right potions and not all of them are clearly spelled out unless you've triggered the relevant mission - you can definitely spend some time on some old-school trial and error trying to figure things out when you first come across them. Monsters respawn quickly, so although you have instant travel back to your home base and quick travel from the main map it's still dangerous trying to get to where you're going. Fighting everything in your way is unwise if you can avoid them instead. NPCs are interesting and strange.
I consider it a compliment that a game with such a simple premise has actually managed to make me walk away in frustration a couple times when I've gotten killed by monsters or couldn't figure out a puzzle.
Overall, I'd give it probably an 8 out of 10 for the the type of game that it is.
