Alchemy Story

I wouldn't buy it at full price, if at all. While Alchemy Story looks cute, it's quite slow. The mechanics feel a bit too simple and repetitive - it's not cozy, it's boring. The only "exciting" thing I experienced was fighting with the controls. Sadly I couldn't be bothered to play enough to care for the characters or story.

There's a glitch that makes the game unplayable later on in the game. As soon as you buy the witch broom, which is mandatory for a quest to progress the main story, the UI starts glitching, it makes the planting menu freeze and doesn't respond to any input. I saw that this bug had been reported before, but nothing is being done to fix it. $20 is WAY too much for a game that doesn't even work towards the end.

First off I want to say that this game if very cute, the art style is so charming, the music and sound effects are great too! I also really like the story of the game, the reason why you are there and the goal of the game as well is very sweet and honestly original. However I don't love that you do not get to create your own character, or even just name yourself. I feel that being given a female, already named character makes it more difficult for players to feel connected to the game. I also feel that the gameplay is simple, but extremely slow. And there is no tutorial which makes it a bit harder to get into the groove of playing. The quests are also very far and few between and I've only been playing for a bit and I already got three repeat quests, which was a little disappointing. Getting to know the villagers is also a little disappointing, there is now way to figure out what they like as gifts other than trial and error, and their hearts go up very very very slowly which makes the idea of trying to get them to full hearts to romance seem like a huge undertaking, Overall I think this game is very cute, but simple to a fault.

No controller support, which I'm surprised hasn't been added. My game is bugged too to where I can't progress (It claims that I can bring a villager into their normal form, but when I get to the study it says mementos are missing even though said list disappeared). It's pretty glitchy as well. Too bad, I really enjoyed Lemon Cake but this was a mess.

i love all the other games i have from the devs but i just can't bring myself to love this one yet. while yes it is an incredibly cute game and i tend to love farming sims, i run into a few issues with this one: 1) lack of controller support. i did not mind this at all with lemon cake or capybara spa as it did not feel like they needed a controller to be enjoyable. but i find myself frustrated with the controls on this and wishing i could use my controller instead of keyboard and mouse. it doesn't make the game impossible to play, i just get frustrated easier than i usually do with other games. 2) lack of instruction. i wish it gave instructions on how to fish, use shovels, etc. it's like you're given instruction to complete a task but am given no direction on where to start with this task. if you receive a new tool you're given no instruction on how to use it (i.e. you have to be standing on a dock to fish, but for some reason it wouldn't work for me on certain docks so it took me a bit to even figure this out) 3) i don't find the map to be very helpful tbh. i like how you can choose to be guided to locations which is helpful, but i just find the map feature itself to be poorly made. with that being said i will continue to play this with the hopes that eventually updates will be released to fix these issues. i think it has a lot of potential, it's just not quite there yet! i can't recommend buying it now but with some TLC i can see this being a great game to purchase, so fingers crossed i can edit this soon to a positive review!

I'm honestly not a huge fan of directionless games. I know people love them for their coziness but I do need some sort of direction. Alchemy Story almost delivers, however you have to wait days and days and days between each main story adventure which feels very tedious and triggers my depression.

I wanted to like this game. I love stardew valley, I love farming sim games, this seemed like a perfect fit. And I do like elements of the game; the material collection and the little helper gopher, but the thing is that the world and visuals are so overly cutesy that everything looks the exact freaking same which leads to fun issues like me getting lost on my own freaking property trying to find my way to a mailbox, or getting so thoroughly turned around in town that I have to rely solely on the map and the 'guide me' feature to get anywhere. I would argue that's a sign of bad design. if everything is so stylised that i need a map to get through a little town after 45 minutes of play, then yeah, things probably should have had more effort put in to making them not all look the same.

Can't seem to be able to get into this game... I find it so so so slooowww... very repetitive, way too grindy and, at the end, very boring. Characters are overly cute (their constant bouncing in place made me dizzy). Gameplay is just not for me. Can't recommend.

It says a lot I bought this on sale and after 16 minutes of gameplay I immediately contacted steam to refund it regardless. Its a real shame because I've wanted to play it for a while--Lemon Cake from the same developer is my all-time favorite comfort game, and I have logged an embarrassing amount of hours into it. But Alchemy Story is their first project, and maybe should've expected the game to be less polished. Though the problem with Alchemy Story is its borderline unplayable. Maybe I'm stupid but I could not see a top down map ANYWHERE, and that one detail turned the entire game from a charming little farm romp to an absolute nightmare to get around. I have no sense of direction in video games to begin with but Alchemy Story's map is so strangely built and so huge it begs you to have a map. Its practically a necessity. I got stuck on the mission to go to the library and ended up wandering around miserably--all the buildings look the same and the signs do not help much. The fact there was a building labeled STUDY I ran into five times but no library attached felt kind of cruel honestly. There does not seem to be any day to night progression or at least from what I could tell so it felt like I was wandering in an endless sunny hellscape. You could probably say if I played it longer my problems would be fixed, but I could tell even if there was a map in the short time I played it I would hate this game. The UI is charming at first in its rough handwritten-ness, but I knew it would bug me the more hours I logged. The camera is fixed at an angle that infuriating to me--not close enough it feels like 1st person but not far enough I can actually breathe. To get through dialogue scenes you have to click on the text bubble rather than anywhere else in the screen, which makes the reading incredibly annoying. There are potion ingredients everywhere, and while normally I'd feel a sense of satisfaction clicking on them they are so haphazardly placed with so many I don't get any of that good collectible serotonin. The farming, which was what I was looking the most forward to, seems to be a mechanic bypassed entirely as a mole does all the work for you. The only positives of this game, the cute soundtrack and the graphics, are overshadowed immediately by me playing lemon cake which has perfected both of them. I feel bad for being so critical of a game by an indie developer who obviously put a lot of love and passion into it--I guess I had such high hopes for it that I was so sadly disappointed. The silver lining though is that it makes their improvement as a game designer so impressive in just a year, as this was released in 2020 and Lemon Cake in 2021. Absolutely mind-boggling honestly, unless Lemon Cake was just a fluke. Their other titles look better though and I will still probably check them out, just with some caution for their more open-world titles. I believe in them though--Alchemy Story was their first game, and it seems like its only gotten better from there.

Abandoned game. No updates in the last 3 years. Replayability is low