Alchemy

Hours played at review time, across 45 reviews with recorded playtime.

positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up

"Alchemy" is a rather poor ripoff of games like Q.U.B.E. and Portal, except the minimalism goes beyond appearance to effort put into the visuals... as little as possible here. In an attempt to compensate, there's quite a few levels in this 3D first person platformer, but more of a bad thing doesn't make it better. What do you do in the game? Wrestle the incredibly sloppy and imprecise controls, look at the zero effort visuals, and maybe solve a few puzzles using gimmicks like "superhuman powers" gained from various potions... the gimmick doesn't work, and the rest of the game quality is too low to compensate for a mediocre, derivative concept. As mentioned, in terms of visuals, this features fairly low quality low poly minimalist 3D graphics which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and while some developers struggle with creating high quality visuals, failing to do so is a disservice to gamers. It's very difficult to recommend bad looking games. On the matter of pricing and value for gamers, most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's often nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of shady pricing schemes that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game. Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable, or something you might want to spend your time on. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 9 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.