Dear Apothecary

Dear Apothecary is a short, single-player casual game with simulation and puzzle elements. You take the role of a community apothecary and make remedies while raising the funds needed for medical school. Clients send requests by pigeon courier, and you return each remedy with the same pigeon. You only get paid if the right client receives the right item; some clients are not trustworthy and should not receive the correct remedy.

Prepare remedies

Use the almanacs at your workplace to learn about clients and ingredients, work out unclear requests, and discover recipes. You grow plants, combine ingredients and make potions, tinctures and other remedies. The game includes 50 quests, 28 ingredients and 30 recipes, with remedies based on period medical knowledge and recipes drawn from or adapted from the time.

Clients and couriers

You meet 23 clients, each with an individual personality and handwriting, and use 17 different courier pigeons to deliver their requests. Recipes, paintings and most client names are period accurate. Optional subtitles are available for the cursive writing and for pigeon colours that may be difficult to distinguish.

Between deliveries

While waiting for a courier, you can read period-accurate poems or play Hazard, an early English dice game. A playthrough takes about 2–4 or more hours.