The Apothecary of Trubiz

A grimoire, a town, and a language that refuses to cooperate

The Apothecary of Trubiz is developer kinjo's compact fictional-language deciphering puzzle game, made with Image Labo and released 6 November 2025 for Windows. Players take over a small provincial apothecary's shop, equipped with nothing but an ancient manual written entirely in an invented language and a steady trickle of patients arriving each day with conditions that need diagnosing and treating. Deciphering that language becomes the entire game: forming hypotheses about individual words, testing them directly by mixing and prescribing medicine, and verifying correctness through the outcome, whether that means a cured patient or, on a rougher run, a considerably worse result. Progress and discovered translations carry over between attempts, with five different endings available depending on how thoroughly, and how accurately, a given run's deductions turn out.

A deduction loop reviewers keep comparing to Chants of Sennaar

The single most consistent thread running through The Apothecary of Trubiz's review corpus is genuine, specific enthusiasm for its core deciphering loop. Multiple reviewers independently compare the game to Chants of Sennaar, with one writing simply "Chants of senaar vibes. 10/10 I'd love to see more of these," and another describing it as "Chants of Sennaar adjacent but less focused on exact word translation," noting players "can just kinda figure things out" rather than pinning down every term with precision. That comparison recurs often enough to function as the corpus's shorthand for the entire experience, with one detailed review specifically praising the "calm, cozy ambiance" that makes the roughly 20-to-30-minute first run "feel like a comfy little ritual rather than a rushed puzzle sprint," crediting carried-over progress between playthroughs, including decoded words and successfully brewed potions, for making each subsequent run feel a little smoother than the last.

Puzzles reviewers say demand an unfair leap

Set against that praise, the single most dominant and independently repeated complaint across The Apothecary of Trubiz's negative reviews concerns fairness in its later deduction puzzles. One detailed review lays out the shape of the problem precisely: "you can figure out about a third of the book with brute force, then... there's a wall," describing "a few things that require such a drastic leap of logic, with literally no hints" once the easier, more inferable portions of the language are exhausted. A separate, detailed review echoes the same structural criticism from further along in the game, describing certain clues as "almost impossible to truly deduce because it's missing some information," adding that even reverse-engineering a known solution afterward left them unsure exactly how they were meant to have reached it. That specific complaint, a genre built entirely on fair deduction occasionally asking for something closer to a guess, recurs consistently enough across the corpus's more detailed critical reviews to stand as the game's clearest design weak point.

Five endings, a few paragraphs each

A further, independently repeated complaint concerns how much new content those five endings actually deliver. One reviewer states the concern plainly: "Multiple endings is not really interesting for a game like this," arguing the setup could support considerably more variation than the finished game makes use of, closer in feel to "a prototype than a finished game" once its central puzzle has been solved once. A separate, shorter review echoes the same disappointment more briefly, noting after missing only a single patient on a first run that "the endings are just a few paragraphs of text," leaving them "not at all motivated to replay the game" to see the remaining outcomes. Even reviewers who enjoyed their first playthrough considerably describe subsequent runs in similar terms, with one noting they'd "basically solved the whole game after the first playthrough," turning the chase for alternate endings into "an exercise in tedium" rather than a fresh follow-up challenge.

A niche genre reviewers wish had more entries

Beyond its specific strengths and weaknesses, a recurring undercurrent across The Apothecary of Trubiz's review corpus is simple appetite for more games doing what it does. Reviewers repeatedly frame the game less as a finished, standalone statement and more as a welcome entry in a genre they wish had greater depth of options, one writing plainly they'd "love to see more of these 'language decoding' games," naming only Chants of Sennaar as a prior point of comparison. That framing helps explain the shape of the game's reception: reviewers grade it kindly for what its small, focused premise delivers in a single sitting, while consistently wishing the underlying systems, deduction puzzles with real, fair logic and a wider cast of patients or scenarios, had been built out further to match the strength of its central idea.

Value

At NZ$5.99, The Apothecary of Trubiz asks very little for a short, focused language-deciphering puzzle, and its Very Positive score, 509 positive against 31 negative across 540 reviews, reflects real enthusiasm for its cozy deduction loop from a review base that clearly wanted more of exactly this kind of game. That reception comes with the caveat of a specific, repeated complaint about unfair logical leaps once the easier portions of its invented language are solved, and a further, independently repeated complaint that its five endings offer only a few paragraphs of new content each, limiting its appeal much past a first playthrough. For fans of Chants of Sennaar-style deduction looking for a short, inexpensive companion piece, The Apothecary of Trubiz is well worth its price; for players wanting a puzzle game that rewards careful logic all the way through, the current review corpus suggests tempering expectations around its back half specifically.