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Here's an alchemy shop-sim that is also a mech-builder deckbuilder

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Apothecary of City X is a mortar-and-pestle mashup.

[Official Broadcast] Frosty Games Fest | Summer Game Fest 2025 - YouTube [Official Broadcast] Frosty Games Fest | Summer Game Fest 2025 - YouTube
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In the southern hemisphere the Summer Game Fest is a winter event. The Frosty Game Fest exists as a counterpoint—highlighting more than 50 games, both new and upcoming, from Australia and New Zealand. Or as the show's tagline puts it: "COOL SH*T FROM ANZ." And you better pronounce it zed.

Enjoying a world premiere at this year's Frosty Game Fest was Apothecary of City X, a sci-fi strategy-simulation where you are the last alchemist in a dystopian future. There's a shop side of things where you have to identify ingredients and deliver people's medicine or poison, as the case may be, which looks a bit like Strange Horticulture.

But there's also an external element where you hit the streets in a junker mech, and fight other mechs in card combat. It's a deckbuilder on the sly, with your deck of cards representing the run-down mech you climb into like a suit of armor when you need to leave your shop for the neon streets of City X.

It's a quirky mash-up. One of the city's zones is called the Breakfast Sector, as revealed in a scene where someone turns a crank on the side of his face seemingly to keep a headlamp running. If you're low on goji berries you can cut a corner by substituting "old soda" in recipes, or swapping out ginseng for inspired cereal. Also, to get new builds for your mech you collect retro cartridges you interact with via some kind of cyberpunk viewmaster interface.

So yeah, it's an unusual one. If you're intrigued by the idea of running your own Chinese apothecary in a dystopian city, there's a Steam page where you can wishlist it. Apothecary of City X is coming to early access in November of 2025.

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Jody Macgregor
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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