Added up, that's an awful lot of clicks. In essence, this game demands strict adherence to a system by which you prioritize the various steps. Is it better to drop ingredients in multiple cauldrons, or should each item start cooking before moving on to the next one? Over time, you'll come to memorize which ingredients you'll need for each item, which can help speed up the process. You're also given a second shelf full of pre-made items like charms. Customers will ask for these, and it takes slightly longer to retrieve them from the shelf than it does grabbing regular ingredients. The caveat with these types of items is that you have to then click on the empty space where they used to be to "reorder" them; a timer begins once you've clicked, and once it elapses, a tentacle puts a new item into the empty slot. You can only reorder one item at a time.

As you complete levels, your shop offers more and more items, each with their own ingredients. Your shelf will just keep getting more and more full, which requires accurate clicking to grab the right ingredient. If you pick the wrong one, you can drop it into the trash can, which is a small monster that eats whatever you give it.

One additional element adds to the chaos: a tiny plant that will only grow if you give it the ingredients it asks for. Customers will ask for the fruit of this "pocus plant", so it's worth that extra trip back and forth to the ingredients shelf, but it tends to be annoying, and can throw you off your rhythm. What the plant wants seems to be randomized, as it will eat pretty much anything and give the exact same fruit regardless of its diet.

You have the option between levels of taking your earnings and investing them in yourself by purchasing special items to help in running the store. For example, you can upgrade your cauldrons to work faster, or buy magical shoes that let you run around more quickly. You can get a harp that increases your customers' patience, so you have longer to gather the items, and you can increase the space on your shelves to hold more special items. And, of course, you can buy more cauldrons to have more than one item cooking at a time.

There is also a between-levels minigame, patterened after the typical "collapse" genre. There is more to this version than is usually offered, however. You're offered specific helpful items that can only be obtained by matching particular colors. Some will be more desirable to you than others, so trying to get just items of that color will prove difficult, given that you have to pretty much remove all colors from the board, or risk failing the minigame when the items reach the top of the space. Chances are that you'll get one of the lesser items before getting the one you want, but even then, a little help is better than nothing. These items will sit somewhere on your shelf and work quietly in the background.

All in all, Mystic Emporium is highly enjoyable with its relentless gameplay, engaging graphics, and multiple purchaseable options, which can add to its replayability. You can grab the one hour demo right here on Big Download.