Apteka

A three-day pharmacy counter game about weighing powders with old tech, reading prescriptions and keeping a family alive.

About the game

You are Paul, a pharmacist behind the counter of a Soviet pharmacy around 1930. At home are your wife Sabina, your seventeen-year-old daughter Irma Renata, and little Eva, who is four and already feverish on the first morning. You have a small purse, three days, and one number that matters: money.

Customers rarely name what they need. They describe an ache, a cough, a sleepless night, and it is up to you to work out what to give them. Find the right jar among hundreds on the shelves, grind it, weigh the dose on a brass balance that has no numbers on it, and hand it over. Get it wrong and you earn nothing. Get it very wrong and somebody is poisoned.

Some of what people ask for is on the poison register: opium, morphine, cocaine and a few others. Those you may give out only against a doctor's paper. A customer who pleads, swears the doctor was out, or offers to pay extra is a test of your nerve, because three citations from the inspectorate and two men in leather coats will be waiting at the door when the counter closes.

Every evening the day's takings must cover supper, the stove and medicine for whoever is ill. Cut a corner and the night collects on it.

Apteka is a short, tense game of craft and small decisions: a counter, a balance, a book of medicines, a ledger and a family. A full run takes roughly twenty minutes.

A short tutorial runs the first time you reach the counter.

Notes

• Windows, 64-bit. The first launch measures your hardware for a few seconds and chooses the graphics settings for you; they can be changed in the menu.
• Playing with a keyboard, a mouse or a gamepad all work.
• Data. During the jam the game sends high-score tables data