The game is an exercise in time and resource management. The player needs to establish branches of the potion shop in the villages throughout the realm, and monitor the daily forecast to determine which curses are going to affect the area. Purchase supplies and upgrades, create potions that will counter the curses, and sell them profitably while working to put competitors out of business.
Developed by Pogo and published with Electronic Arts, it can be found on Big Fish Games here
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This video game mixes potions for:
- Brutish Bulls: One of your rivals is a mob of bulls in leisure suits known as the Mad Cows.
- But Thou Must!: No matter how much you don't trust Sneersworth, he will always succeed in his sabotage attempts no matter what you tell him to do, and will act like you agreed anyway.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: You and each of your rivals are assigned a color. Looking at the area map shows patches of color representing the area of influence each shop and its goons have, and this is also the color representing each faction on graphs and popularity charts.
- Blue Is Heroic: Your color is blue.
- Bull Seeing Red: The Mad Cows are red. Overlaps with Red Is Violent, as this is the only rival who openly threatens to harm you.
- Green and Mean: Sneersworth, in Castle City, is green.
- Purple Is Powerful: The Magic Dragons are purple.
- Redheads Are Uncool: The Not-So-Handsome Princes are orange, and the only one of the group ever seen onscreen has hair of a similar color.
- Visual Pun: The Bearzinis are gold - as in Goldilocks.
- Crapsaccharine World: Sure, there's magic and princes and balls and fairy godmothers... but peasants get cursed all the time and the cures for curses are sold by heavily-competing mafia-like corporations.
- Crystal Ball: An upgradable tool, it allows you to look into the future to see what conditions are expected in the near future with regards to both curses and potion ingredient costs.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Tutorialville, the first village where you set up shop, is the game's tutorial.
- Exposition Fairy: Paulie, one of the Godmother's longtime employees, is a goblin nearing his retirement.note Pretty much his final job is to serve as your advisor, guiding you through an interface tutorial. Afterwards, he's relegated to an icon at the top of the screen, and you can click on him if you forget what certain screens do.
- Fantasy Kitchen Sink: In addition to the traditional fairy tale characters, the game also has a number of original characters, figures from Greek mythology, and nursery rhyme characters.
- Fantasy World Map: How you move around Onceuponia. Each section is entirely different from its neighbors and you can only move to the next one after you've established yourself in the current one.
- Fast-Forward Mechanic: You can select the speed at which the business day will progress onscreen.
- Feeling Their Age: What the Fairy Godmother has actually been doing for some time. Once you've conquered the final level, Castle City, she declares that you are her successor and she's retiring. She plans to travel to Wonderland and Oz.
- Fictional Currency: All the money in this game takes the form of magic beans, which are represented symbolically by what looks like a number 3 with a line drawn down the center.
- Fractured Fairy Tale: Oh, so much.
- Goldilocks works with the three bears to run a rival shop called the Bearzinis.
- Another rival group calls themselves the Not-So-Handsome Princes.
- You can persuade the Pied Piper to give his rats to Little Bo Peep, in order to replace her sheep. She rewards you with a sweater knitted from rat hair.
- The Fairy Godmother is more like a mob boss than a sweet savior, and makes money off potions, not miracles.
- Many of the stories you can get involved in during the levels as well - they're even called "Forked Fables" in the help file. Jack and Jill are scam artists, Rapunzel is being used to sell wigs, and Red Riding Hood's grandma is a werewolf!
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: Even if you hook the head of the Not-So-Handsome Princes up with one of Cinderella's stepsisters and he says he's closing his shop, the Princes' shop will remain open. One assumes he was not the only prince working there, but still...
- Girl in the Tower: Rapunzel is this, much like in her fairy tale, but here she's being forced to make wigs. You have the option to rescue her.
- Good Is Dumb: The King of Onceuponia, as described in the opening narration, is a kind-hearted but stupid guy. The Fairy Godmother's rise to success came about because she helped the people after he declared war on the Dutch. Why did he do this? Because the trees in Onceuponia were stricken by Dutch elm disease.
- Grey-and-Gray Morality: You're more than capable of being just as underhanded as your competitors, if not more so in some cases. While ostensibly the "good" faction, you can hire crooks to rob the opposition, hijackers to steal their ingredients, someone to sabotage their labs, and goons to scare away or even outright steal their customers. Worst of all, the way to win many levels is to drive the competition's store out of business, and doing it enough closes the company for good.
- Happily Ever After:
- When you beat the game, the ending story proclaims that you and everyone (except Sneersworth) get to enjoy this. Yes, even your other rivals.
- This is the name of the secondary game mode which lets you replay your favorite villages once you've won them.
- Judgment of Solomon: Invoked in one possible arc of the Little Bo Peep incident. If you approach Mary (as in "Had a Little Lamb") instead of the Pied Piper, you're asked to judge who gets the lamb she's found. You can Take a Third Option and insist on splitting it between them, with the expectation that one of them will yield, but instead they come to an amicable agreement on who will get which parts of the resultant lamb roast.
- Loading Screen: Just one, when you first start the game; it features a status bar which takes the form of Pinocchio's nose.
- Loan Shark: A literal one - a shark in a business suit who will lend you money to fund your enterprise.
- Loophole Abuse: The Godmother will always pay back the loan shark once a level if you go bankrupt. Savvy players can integrate this into their spending strategy.
- The Mafia: A lot of the potion business is played this way. Rival shops are treated more like rival crime families with whom you're in a turf war.
- The Mole: Similar to the loan shark, he's literally a mole; he wears a trenchcoat and can be hired to spy on your rivals and find out what they know and how much they're charging.
- Money Multiplier: Particularly happy customers may throw small sacks of magic beans onto your screen like a tip, increasing the amount of profit you make in a round. However, if you don't click on them before the round ends, they disappear for good.
- Mooks: They're called goons, and both you and your rivals can hire them to lure customers. Which ones are available to hire vary from one area to the next, but they include a siren, Prince Charming, and a Magic Carpet.
- Naked People Are Funny: They're victims of a curse which caused them to donate all their clothes to charity, and now walk around with Censor Bars over their privates. They require a Liquid Clothing potion.
- No Animals Were Harmed: The second upgrade for your warehouse is an ivory tower, and the Flavor Text makes a point of assuring you that it's faux ivory, so no elephants were harmed in its construction.
- Nobody Touches the Hair: In a verbal sense. One of the "tips" you may receive at the end of a business day is to never make fun of the Fairy Godmother's hair, as she's rather sensitive about it.
- Non Sequitur: Both the Daily News blurbs and the "Tip o' the Day" can fall into this.
- Obviously Evil: The Godmother's second in command, Sneersworth, who doesn't show up until you reach the Sure Would Forest. Heavily lampshaded by the Godmother herself, but this somehow does not stop her from trusting him until after his third sabotage incident... at which point she wonders why she hired someone with such an obviously evil name instead of going with her second choice, a young woman called Nicegirl.
- Only in It for the Money: The Fairy Godmother will straight up admit to you that she's in the potion business for the money, and helping people in need is just sort of a bonus that comes with it.
- Parental Bonus: Ostensibly this game is aimed at a younger demographic, but a lot of the humor falls into this. For instance, Goldilocks and the Mad Cows get into an argument about the stock market.note
- Pun: They often appear in various places throughout the game, including character dialogue.
- Random Number God:
- There's no rhyme or reason to when an ingredient will be pricey or cheap or when a curse forecast will be high or low. This can screw you over if you spend a lot of money to make a pricey potion and people stop buying or if there's high demand for a potion and you can't afford what's needed to make it. This is slightly mitigated in later levels by the highest upgrade to the crystal ball; it allows you to see what the next day is going to be like.
- Similarly, there's no way to know if the freelance "Local Characters" you hire to make potions or cripple your competition will succeed or fail in their efforts. One of them is even prone to stealing your money and running away to Tahiti! (Local Characters who do things to affect the peasants, however, will always succeed.)
- Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Once you put him out of business in Castle City, thus winning the game, Sneersworth eventually annoys a witch and gets turned into a frog. He then spends the rest of his days trying to convince princesses to kiss him, but instead he catches the attention of a French chef...
- Robber Baron: One of the "Local Characters" you may be able to hire for freelance gigs. They break into your rivals' shops and steal money for you... unless they get caught in the process.
- Santa Claus: One of his elves is available as an upgrade to your potion-making employee. Apparently he's a Bad Boss who won't even share his milk and cookies, let alone pay the elves.
- Shout-Out: One of the goons you can hire is Blaire the Witch.
- Sleepyhead: According to one of the news headlines, Sleeping Beauty has chronic fatigue syndrome.
- The Smurfette Principle: Lampshaded in the Upgrade menu. The first upgrade you can buy for your warehouse looks exactly like a mushroom house from The Smurfs, and the Flavor Text explains that it's from a village which used to be inhabited by a race of small blue beings. They went extinct due to a lack of females.
- Speaking Simlish: Most dialogue appears onscreen. However, if you or one of your rivals employ the Prince Charming goon, he can be heard doing this.
- The Starscream: Sneersworth, after sabotaging you and the Godmother for the third time, shows up to announce that he has opened his own rival potion shop in Castle City, the richest town in Onceuponia, and also that the Fairy Godmother's flagship store in that area was mysteriously robbed and destroyed.
- Stock Schtick: One of the daily "tips" you can receive is a play on the old fortune cookie gag - "Help, I'm trapped in a helpful tip-writing factory!"
- The Stoner: The Magic Dragons, first encountered in Shoe Haven, give off this vibe.
- Symbol Swearing: One curse forces peasants to do this; they walk around with red symbol-filled speech bubbles over their heads until they acquire the antidote, aptly titled "No More @$#!ing Swearing."
- Take That, Audience!: When describing her retirement plans, the Fairy Godmother asks if you're familiar with downloading games onto a computer. Your avatar replies that it sounds like a waste of time.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential:
- One goon you can hire puts more curses on the peasants so they'll have to buy from you.
- You can also be very mean and calculating in how you handle the various fairy tale events, including outright choosing not to help people at all. (However, helping them usually nets a reward of some kind, so you're not encouraged to take the nasty paths.)
- Villain Team-Up: In one level, the Not-So-Handsome Princes and the Magic Dragons form an alliance, for no clear reason (other than to annoy the Godmother).
