Alchemyland is barely a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. The Russian asset flip scammer behind this did include an asset flip of the Ren'Py "Memory" card matcher minigame, however... copying + pasting that from the Ren'Py construction kit still doesn't constitute actual game development.
As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game. This e-book was slapped together with the godawfully bad RenPy Visual Novel/E-Book construction kit, so just like no professional writing took place here, no professional game development took place either, it's just a product of filling out templates in the construction kit.
This is a badly written and badly translated Russian E-book about a wizard, punctuated with the "Memory" tile matching minigame the developer stole from the Ren'Py construction kit.
Visual novels/e-books are tedious at best... imagine the best novel you ever read, be that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Twilight (if you have terrible taste in literature), but then translate that to a format where the words dribble out and you have to click your mouse every time you wanted to read the next sentence, instead of just turning the pages. You'd think it was garbage.
Now imagine that experience, but with much worse writing (because if these guys could write professionally, they'd be published authors and this would be on shelves in bookstores, and they wouldn't have to pay Valve $100 to self-publish this on Steam), and you have your average Steam e-book.
You can get better quality books and comics for free online or from public libraries, or from bookstores for a fraction of the price of this "game". Steam isn't a comic book store, neither is it Netflix, it's for games. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. It's impossible for me to recommend things to PC gamers that aren't really games.
The Russian, azimuth team, has a known history of trying to scam people into paying them money for someone else's work, through this account or through closely linked/alt accounts. One example of azimuth team doing this is [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/828230]Dungeons of the dead[/url], which is really the "[url=https://learn.unity.com/project/2d-roguelike-tutorial]2D Roguelike Tutorial[/url]" asset, written by the actual developers, Unity Technologies.
The E-Book was abandoned roughly less than a month after launch and hasn't been updated in almost 7 years. It blew past the developers commitment to complete the E-Book without any notification or admission of failure from the developer. The E-Book will never be completed.
You don't have to take my word about how bad the E-Book is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Alchemyland has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the E-Book absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for completing the first tutorial Memory minigame, trivial to achieve, but less than 4 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the E-Book. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this E-Book was with readers reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in reader counts for the E-Book. But this isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 4 percent of readers bothered playing the E-Book for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this E-Book to have so many concurrent readers who didn't bother to read the E-Book? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.
That tells us people only really bought this E-Book for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the E-Book just has a couple of readers every week running up the E-Book and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many E-Books like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
Unethically, the developer sold keys to this abandoned Early Access E-Book into cheap, nasty game bundles, where they knew it would be advertised and sold as a complete PC game. This seems to have been done in an attempt to mislead gamers into buying a knowingly faulty, defective and incomplete product. When a developer does this for a game they have zero practical intention of completing, this is essentially a scam, an intention to get paid for a broken/unfinished product. Often this is done as an exit strategy, as the developer takes the money and runs. No refunds have been given, the developer kept all the money they took from gamers.
Another unethical act of this developer, knowing full well that this E-Book is abandoned and they will never complete it, they are deliberately trying to scam gamers into buying it by offering it on discount from time to time. It's impossible to "accidentally" discount a game. The developer looked at their abandoned game, and instead of doing the right thing and removing it from Steam, they instead doubled-down and tried to scam even more people into paying for it. Greedy, and completely unethical. Doing the wrong thing, on purpose, for money. This is not okay.
[b][quote][url=https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2017/01/18/steam-takes-down-art-of-stealth-after-developer-posts-fake-reviews/?sh=750e13e12354]Warning: Review Manipulation![/url][/quote][/b]This E-Book features a small number of fake positive reviews from accounts known to be in the business of review manipulation/paid reviews. They're all written in either Russian or broken English, appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the E-Book launched on Steam, all have a direct Steam purchase of the E-Book, and the accounts are used consistently to write fake reviews for asset flips and other cash grabs/scams. The "Positive" review score on this E-Book should be disregarded due to this blatant, unethical review manipulation. This is done to deceive and scam gamers into paying for a bad product.
Alchemyland is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the E-Book, coupled with the unrealistic price, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer and/or their associates (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend.
