This review contains spoilers
I'm always excited to try more alchemy games- it's one of my favorite themes. This game was a special treat due to its incredibly unique core system. Ingredients corresponding to paths of movement on a map of potion effects- Wow that's fascinating!
The alchemy map traversal system shines due to the focus on a wide and goofy cast of ingredients. There's so many hilarious, strange, awkward, and interesting paths. Spending time with this game is an exercise in learning to appreciate these herbs,mushrooms and crystals. It's incredible how even the most wasteful loop-de-loops, spirals, and paths that turn back on themselves have their moments. I want to really empthasize how memorable the ingredients are here. It's quite satisfying both to become more familiar with them and discover new ones
The resource management aspect forces some occasional additionial creativity and decision making. Sometimes you'll be forced to adapt to what you have on hand, sometimes it's worth taking the scenic route to conserve scarce plants. What's even better at slightly shaking up your map decisions is the experience books. The experience trying to figure out how to fit in the ones that you judge to be conviently along the way synergizes with the odd arsenal of plants quite well.
I like how the threat of bleeding ingredients encourages creating efficient recipes. It's also neat how progress leads to some better ways to make things. I especially like the introduction of the oil map- it's definitely a severe case of missed potential that there's not more maps. If they wanted to get wild then an advanced mechanic that involves switching maps while a potion is in progress could be awesome. {Although i see why they wouldn't do this, it invites quite a few problems}
The mechanics of adding base to move towards the center for free and using the mortar and pestle to decide how much of an ingredient's path to manifest are quite solid. Although, as a physical action to perform the mortar and pestle SUCKS. I don't know if my thumb or joystick hates me more for playing this game. What a terrible repetitive motion. I can see how it fits the game, especially for constructing partial paths but at the very least they need a tool to automatically fully grind things.
Another way this map business works well is the effect strength mechanics. The level III effects encouraging precision is a good thing to ask of the player in this system.
I find myself thinking of all the pieces of this alchemy system and wow do they work together well. Now just a cool idea, but a good execution too!
The feature of being able to save recipes is essential . Without them the entire game would fall apart under the mind numbing repetition of potion brewing. The system works best when you're exploring the map or trying to make a specific potion for the first time. Even with recipes, depending on my mood it can feel like the game's just too tedious and wasting my time. I definitely can't play arbitrarily long sessions of this game the same way I can for so many other games
Having to remake substances again is only barely tolerable because of recipes- having to manually brew some of those potions again would actually be insane. Especially due to the baffling choice to make each tier of substances have 2 branches- each of which consume 1 of the previous tier crystal. It's quite annoying, and the salt in the wound is having to recraft alchemical salt if you run out. Auto Recipes for substances that recursively craft the potions and other substances you need is a feature that would improve this experience a lot. Better yet, just make the alchemist guy who occasionally visits sell substances you've made. It's a bit of a shame that recrafting substances feels like such a waste of my time, because on the first time they're quite a rewarding/suitably daunting task
I quite enjoy the discovery aspect of this game- uncovering fog on the map and being introduced to new stuff through progress. Unfortunately both of those things are finite- the alchemist path progression goals take you comfortably beyond content limits. Speaking of that, chapter X is actually insane. Reach 15 popularity level... are these devs out of their goddamn mind? I enjoyed my time with this game and was intending to see it through to the end, but I had to drop it after realizing that I'd be mindlessly grinding for hours to acheive that final sprint.
I'm curious what the dropoff rate on the alchemist's path completition is. Let's look at the steam achievement percentages
Complete Chapter I - 57%
Complete Chapter II- 42.6%
Complete Chapter III - 30.4%
Complete Chapter IV- 20.3%
Complete Chapter V- 13.1%
Complete Chapter VI- 9.3%
Complete Chapter VII- 6.9%
Complete Chapter VIII - 5.4%
Complete Chapter IX - 3.1%
Complete Chapter X- 1.1%
Let's put that into perspective. 20% of steam stardew valley players have completed the community center. 2.5% of steam Shenzhen I/O players have beat the game. 8.4% of steam terraria players have gotten the ankh shield, 7.7% the cellphone. 10% of steam celeste players have gotten all red strawberries. All of these are higher than the amount of people who have finished the last chapter of alchemist's path.
Part of the problem with the later alchemist path chapters is they present daunting goals after the game has already ran out of steam. It seems like the devs are currently developing more content and features for this game, perhaps the latter part of alchemist's path is speculative for when these additions are done.
I played this game on Xbox. This is very obviously a pc game that's been ported- i groaned when i opened up the game and saw that i was controlling a cursor with my joystick. The UX actually wasn't as bad as i was expecting it to be- the quick radial menu and toggle between free/snapping movement do a lot of heavy lifting. Still unideal though. The flaws are most noticable once you're in endgame with pages of herbs and recipes. {Also why do the recipe bookmarks overlap each other like that, it's stupid that buying more recipes will at some point straight up obscure ones you have}.
This game has a remarkably long startup time
The slow-burn player driven pacing is nice. I generally prefer stressful games, but this works well here. It fits the platonic idea of a patient alchemist studying their craft and servicing customers as a supplementary routine.
There are only 2 music tracks in this game. Lol lmao. Yeah i muted it pretty fast and just listened my own music. The art style is unique and they did a fine job , but it doesn't feel particularly significant to my experience. There's a pleasant variety of character designs. The dialog is serviceable but not particularly interesting. There's a slight degree of intrepretation for what potion people want, but it's mostly them fairly directly telling you. I think it's better that way, but it's hard to tell. Maybe there's some potential in this component, although i did have a few slightly frustrating moments trying to decipher the few unintuitive ones already shrug.
I like the presentation of haggling- the way the conversation topics are presented from the perspective of someone searching for suitable small talk is pretty good. Other than that, haggling leans more towards a boring mechanic than an exciting one.
I adore the excited expression characters make when you offer them a potion
It annoys me that they left UI in the game for shop upgrades since there are none you can obtain. I guess it's either vestigial or speculative. Either way it breaks a promise to the player
The alchemy map traversal system shines due to the focus on a wide and goofy cast of ingredients. There's so many hilarious, strange, awkward, and interesting paths. Spending time with this game is an exercise in learning to appreciate these herbs,mushrooms and crystals. It's incredible how even the most wasteful loop-de-loops, spirals, and paths that turn back on themselves have their moments. I want to really empthasize how memorable the ingredients are here. It's quite satisfying both to become more familiar with them and discover new ones
The resource management aspect forces some occasional additionial creativity and decision making. Sometimes you'll be forced to adapt to what you have on hand, sometimes it's worth taking the scenic route to conserve scarce plants. What's even better at slightly shaking up your map decisions is the experience books. The experience trying to figure out how to fit in the ones that you judge to be conviently along the way synergizes with the odd arsenal of plants quite well.
I like how the threat of bleeding ingredients encourages creating efficient recipes. It's also neat how progress leads to some better ways to make things. I especially like the introduction of the oil map- it's definitely a severe case of missed potential that there's not more maps. If they wanted to get wild then an advanced mechanic that involves switching maps while a potion is in progress could be awesome. {Although i see why they wouldn't do this, it invites quite a few problems}
The mechanics of adding base to move towards the center for free and using the mortar and pestle to decide how much of an ingredient's path to manifest are quite solid. Although, as a physical action to perform the mortar and pestle SUCKS. I don't know if my thumb or joystick hates me more for playing this game. What a terrible repetitive motion. I can see how it fits the game, especially for constructing partial paths but at the very least they need a tool to automatically fully grind things.
Another way this map business works well is the effect strength mechanics. The level III effects encouraging precision is a good thing to ask of the player in this system.
I find myself thinking of all the pieces of this alchemy system and wow do they work together well. Now just a cool idea, but a good execution too!
The feature of being able to save recipes is essential . Without them the entire game would fall apart under the mind numbing repetition of potion brewing. The system works best when you're exploring the map or trying to make a specific potion for the first time. Even with recipes, depending on my mood it can feel like the game's just too tedious and wasting my time. I definitely can't play arbitrarily long sessions of this game the same way I can for so many other games
Having to remake substances again is only barely tolerable because of recipes- having to manually brew some of those potions again would actually be insane. Especially due to the baffling choice to make each tier of substances have 2 branches- each of which consume 1 of the previous tier crystal. It's quite annoying, and the salt in the wound is having to recraft alchemical salt if you run out. Auto Recipes for substances that recursively craft the potions and other substances you need is a feature that would improve this experience a lot. Better yet, just make the alchemist guy who occasionally visits sell substances you've made. It's a bit of a shame that recrafting substances feels like such a waste of my time, because on the first time they're quite a rewarding/suitably daunting task
I quite enjoy the discovery aspect of this game- uncovering fog on the map and being introduced to new stuff through progress. Unfortunately both of those things are finite- the alchemist path progression goals take you comfortably beyond content limits. Speaking of that, chapter X is actually insane. Reach 15 popularity level... are these devs out of their goddamn mind? I enjoyed my time with this game and was intending to see it through to the end, but I had to drop it after realizing that I'd be mindlessly grinding for hours to acheive that final sprint.
I'm curious what the dropoff rate on the alchemist's path completition is. Let's look at the steam achievement percentages
Complete Chapter I - 57%
Complete Chapter II- 42.6%
Complete Chapter III - 30.4%
Complete Chapter IV- 20.3%
Complete Chapter V- 13.1%
Complete Chapter VI- 9.3%
Complete Chapter VII- 6.9%
Complete Chapter VIII - 5.4%
Complete Chapter IX - 3.1%
Complete Chapter X- 1.1%
Let's put that into perspective. 20% of steam stardew valley players have completed the community center. 2.5% of steam Shenzhen I/O players have beat the game. 8.4% of steam terraria players have gotten the ankh shield, 7.7% the cellphone. 10% of steam celeste players have gotten all red strawberries. All of these are higher than the amount of people who have finished the last chapter of alchemist's path.
Part of the problem with the later alchemist path chapters is they present daunting goals after the game has already ran out of steam. It seems like the devs are currently developing more content and features for this game, perhaps the latter part of alchemist's path is speculative for when these additions are done.
I played this game on Xbox. This is very obviously a pc game that's been ported- i groaned when i opened up the game and saw that i was controlling a cursor with my joystick. The UX actually wasn't as bad as i was expecting it to be- the quick radial menu and toggle between free/snapping movement do a lot of heavy lifting. Still unideal though. The flaws are most noticable once you're in endgame with pages of herbs and recipes. {Also why do the recipe bookmarks overlap each other like that, it's stupid that buying more recipes will at some point straight up obscure ones you have}.
This game has a remarkably long startup time
The slow-burn player driven pacing is nice. I generally prefer stressful games, but this works well here. It fits the platonic idea of a patient alchemist studying their craft and servicing customers as a supplementary routine.
There are only 2 music tracks in this game. Lol lmao. Yeah i muted it pretty fast and just listened my own music. The art style is unique and they did a fine job , but it doesn't feel particularly significant to my experience. There's a pleasant variety of character designs. The dialog is serviceable but not particularly interesting. There's a slight degree of intrepretation for what potion people want, but it's mostly them fairly directly telling you. I think it's better that way, but it's hard to tell. Maybe there's some potential in this component, although i did have a few slightly frustrating moments trying to decipher the few unintuitive ones already shrug.
I like the presentation of haggling- the way the conversation topics are presented from the perspective of someone searching for suitable small talk is pretty good. Other than that, haggling leans more towards a boring mechanic than an exciting one.
I adore the excited expression characters make when you offer them a potion
It annoys me that they left UI in the game for shop upgrades since there are none you can obtain. I guess it's either vestigial or speculative. Either way it breaks a promise to the player