Cauldron Chaos: Brew Potions & Tidy Up is a potion-brewing organisation game where you wade through over 1,000 ingredients to brew nearly 200 potions — all with a little help from magic. But after a shoddy incantation sends your cauldron exploding, you have to clean up your laboratory… or face your master’s wrath.
We were rather excited for this game, imagining I’d be brewing potions à la Harry Potter. Sadly, I was wrong. Despite its cosy look and Arcane Library inspiration, Cauldron Chaos felt half-brewed, particularly as a co-op game. You might want to play this one solo — if at all.
I Can Teach You To Bottle Fame
Cauldron Chaos starts promisingly. You play as charming woodland animals in a lovely lab, surrounded by cute, made-up ingredients. It’s an aesthetically pleasing setting for cosy gamers, with no time pressure. Brew at your leisure.
Mechanics are basic. Use your wand to pick up ingredients and place them in the cauldron, on a shelf, or in a cooking area. You get all 180 potion recipes immediately, so you can start brewing straight away. Simply follow the ingredient list, chuck everything into the cauldron in the correct order, and pull the lever.
If you love crossing things off a list, you’ll probably get absorbed into Cauldron Chaos pretty quickly. I’m absolutely one of those people, but a basic organisation game isn’t something I’d ordinarily choose to play with friends — and they weren’t particularly keen after a few minutes either.
Double, Double, Toil and Trouble
Cauldron Chaos initially lived up to its name as we scrambled around trying to organise ourselves. We frequently spoke over each other, grabbed the same ingredients and generally got in each other’s way. Ingredients also roll around when you walk into them, so mind your step! They can be particularly fiddly to pick up when they’re buried underneath other ingredients.
I suspect this is where the “chaos” is supposed to come in. Especially because we all ended up doing the same thing.
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After about 15 minutes, we had the whole process down pat: find ingredients, put them in the cauldron, brew the potion and put it on the correct shelf. Some ingredients need to be pulverised, chopped or distilled, but all these methods are available from the beginning. There’s no real sense of progression, and once we realised this was essentially the whole game, the magic wore off pretty quickly.
There’s also not much of a story beyond knowing that we need to complete all the potions to escape the laboratory. Cauldron Chaos felt less chaotic and more… complacent.
You can buy spells by completing shelves of potions, which should give you a little more incentive to keep brewing. Unfortunately, they don’t feel particularly impactful. They reminded me of the spells in Arcane Library, but without that same sense of progression or reward.
Even worse, the spells only affect the person who casts them rather than the whole group. In a co-op game, that seems like a missed opportunity.
Draught Of Living Death
I went into Cauldron Chaos expecting a little more potion-brewing than simply finding ingredients and chucking them into one big cauldron. Where are the stirring directions? Why can’t I actually chop the ingredients? Why won’t you let me be a potions master?
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Instead, the brewing process remains remarkably hands-off. For a game built around potion-making, I wanted more opportunities to actually make the potions. The recipes left much to be desired too; simply repeating themselves and adding one or two extra ingredients.
The co-op experience also feels undercooked. There’s no way to pass ingredients to each other, and there’s no in-game chat, text or emotes. Unless you’re expected to play without voice chat, there’s little to facilitate communication between players.
My BIGGEST gripe though? Cauldron Chaos doesn’t autosave. After a couple of painful hours, we quit the game expecting our progress to be there when we returned. It wasn’t.
There was no prompt to save. No warning that we were about to lose everything. Just poof.
All of our progress was gone.
In 2026, I expect a game to either autosave or, at the very least, tell me that quitting will erase my progress.
That was the biggest letdown for me, particularly because I’m arguably the target audience. I’ve finished Arcane Library, enjoyed it and came into Cauldron Chaos wanting more of that cosy magical organisation goodness. Instead, my cauldron exploded like a Dr Filibuster’s Fabulous Wet-Start, No-Heat Firework landed in it.
Cauldron Chaos has a cute aesthetic and a simple premise that could work well for a cosy co-op game. Unfortunately, its shallow mechanics, lack of meaningful progression, and missing quality-of-life features leave it feeling more like a first draft than a finished potion.
As a debut game, there’s definitely something here to build on. Hopefully, Skill Issue Studios can take the feedback on board and give its upcoming releases a little more magic.
Cauldron Chaos: Brew Potions & Tidy Up is out now on PC via Steam.
Quest Daily scores Cauldron Chaos: Brew Potions & Tidy Up:
5/10
Codes were supplied to Quest Daily for this review.
