Alchemist's Alcove

Realy cool game, started playing and stoped like 5 hours later. The only complaints i have are that there could be a seperate wasd for map movement so it doesnt get jumbled with the character movement and the ability to make categorys to put your resipes into and mabe a search bar.

Cheap little sleeper hit. Dungeoneering is like old-school NES Zelda, rogue-lite with impressive gear combinations and a very challenging level of monsters but not anxiety inducing. You can chill out while playing. Downloaded it on a whim and there went my day off. Can't give a higher compliment than that.

Shattered pixel dungeon meets alchemy. This is a fine game, where you play as an alchemist and discover various recipe, items and spells to play through a dungeon and figure out the game's secret : create the philosopher stone. And that's a fine puzzle game, with a neat idea and a bit of exploration. However the replayability does drop once you understand how things work a bit, though as far as I know, the dev is working on adding new content. It's still a good time for a decent 20 hours (for me) with many many things to discover, and it does manage to sell you on its fantasy quite well. At first I was a bit scared of having to find recipes on my own and feared getting stuck, but the game managed to bring me to it and make me like it.

Aburdly good. I only have 10 pages of the notebook and already its realy cool all the tools and weapons i made. I havent seen everything but i hope people buy this game so we have updates with more weapons or areas!

Ate a Mushroom, vomited, combined said vomit with the bones of my enemies, and proceeded to rub this unholy concoction into the Philosopher's Stone. this allowed me to make a vial of "GREEN", letting me turn diamonds into a infinite supply of High explosive spells 10/10 - beta tester Dyslexic Tinkerer

The absolute golden example of a classic roguelike. The first few runs may be a pain of "wait, how do I survive??", but then the real gameplay strikes and its SO thematic, SO satisfying. If you somewhat liked the visual style of the trailer - I strongly recommend this to you, it delivers! Its quite painful to play this on steamdeck, but even with this - I liked it so much! Upd. --- Well, this was before I died for the first time after a 3h run --- To my sadness, the feeling of discovery vanishes just at a point where I wrote my review for the first time. I still leave it as a positive one, for the hours I really liked, BUT 1. The crafting tree is exciting. The spells it provides are not. They are, essentially, one of three types 1.1. Damaging spells - unlimited usage ones are borderline useless agains mid-tier enemies. Limited usage is better spells, but there are actually only 2-3 useful options to deal with everything that is not a base kobold. It boils down to: farm one easy area -> craft this one spell -> clear next one non-easy area. 1.2. Static summon spells - that just makes enemies attack it instead of you. Essentially it gives you time to cast damaging spells. And it does NO OTHER EFFECT, that is a real crime imo. In the end, this feels ultra useless to just spend your time on crafting those. 1.3. One time buffs - this is nice. I like this. There are not many such... 2. Crafting system is okay-ish. You dont need to travel to each component on the screen in fact (you can alt+click the floor anywhere on the screen, not just next to you), but it is a bit tedious. 3. There is no meta-progression as such. You can keep you recipes, but it wont help you progress the game - you'll need to gather all the resources once again anyway. The game becomes nearly linear once you know the order of spells and components for them. To sum up: I may try to beat this game once again. But it feels simply unfinished. The art and vibes are 10/10, but the gamedesign ideas are... just okay. Upd. Upd. I got it, the replayability is the problem. Started another run - and I had to execute literally the same sequence in the same order, maaan... I just dont see why its a permadeath game if nothing changes between "runs" - then it as well could be a save-load game, with save being some costy spell