Artificer: Science of Magic

The game starts out quite fun. The art style is ok and you'll be discovering recipes working mini games to research monster parts after you've killed them. It's interesting. It plays similar to "Don't Starve" without the hunger aspects. But like the "Don't Starve" series the developers want to you to enjoy discovering the game and avoid hand holding as much as possible. ...this is where the issues being to show up. You WILL...run into some pretty solid brick walls in progression of the game. The game is setup with the expectation that you'll perform certain tasks that will hint to the path forward...but..they are extremely poorly implemented...easily skipped...leaving you completely lost and at stand still. You'll just have to perform random actions hoping that something happens in your benefit. A guessing game. For example.....The game starts and your crash land onto the planet. You're told to build a campfire as soon as you can. ...there is absolutely no explanation as to HOW to build a campfire...what are the resource requirements?...where can you find them??? You are with a "Genius" companion...but you don't have the ability to ask him how to build a campfire or navigate the interfaces. Eventually you'll figure out that you can use your crashed escape shuttle as a "workbench" which is required in order to build a campfire..... ....because you can't just gather wood and kindle together on your own for some reason????? And then as soon as you build it...enemies rush at you from all angles. You're SUPPOSED to light the fire and scare them away...but you don't know that. Not only do you know know that....but you need fuel to light the fire which you may not have gather and have no idea about. And lastly...the enemies can be avoid by running way, which is the easier..but then you miss the message that they are "afraid of fire" which you're supposed to use to your advantage later on. I don't know, maybe you're supposed to die over and over till you figure it out. Whatever the case, it's this repeated issue to leads to constant stalemates with the game and drains it of the fun you were having. Couple that with there only being a finite supply of resources (somethings that respawn) like healing ingredients and you've got a game that slowly...very slowly kills you forcing you to start over (adventure mode). No, I haven't died yet. 11 hours in and getting there. Other then that the game is good. Controls can take some getting used to but they work. the monsters attack in unique ways and make take some thought to defeat. Music is good but plays on repeat. Wait for a good Wiki to read through on what you're supposed to do, otherwise you'll never see the "Science" or "Magic" this title contains.

Don't be fooled by the superficial similarities to Don't Starve, this isn't an open-ended base-building survival-crafting game; it's a narrative puzzle-adventure with a mixing of interesting and innovative survival-crafting mechanics. On release, a number of the puzzles were quite obscure and didn't have particularly apparent clues - since then the game has been patched a number of times and the progression is a lot clearer than it was, but if you're expecting it NOT to be a puzzler, you're probably going to get frustrated still. You're also likely to be disappointed that the game kinda just stops once you've "unlocked everything", because it's telling a story rather than being an open-ended "see how long you can last" type of game. All in all, it's a rough diamond of a game. In some ways it feels like there's a lot of unrealised potential... but that it leaves you wanting to spend more time in its gloriously 60s french-psychedelia styled sci-fi world perhaps shows just how well it actually hit its mark.

This game is an enjoyable little survival adventure that mixes scifi and fantasy in a really interesting way. Plus you can pat the Doggo so 11/10. EDIT: For disclosure I am a Patreon supporter of the developer, however that was because the game looked very good so YMMV.

This is more of an Early preview since I've only been playing it for about an hour and a half but man I must say I really love what I've seen, I almost never review games so I'm going to give it my best describing why I like it so much The world looks kinda normal, like it's just earth with bigger creatures but researching it definitely feels wonderful, the mechanics really drive in that ''I'm some scientist that knows nothing about this planet and I'm basically just trying my best'' which really makes me enjoy researching stuff, while at first it feels like you are just trying random things until some work you start to realise they follow some kind of sense The research is mainly done through looking up new objects by holding right click, it gives you some points that you use by doing some kind of minigames, at first you only research new crafting recipes but as the game goes you start getting into more useful or interesting things like dissecting dead animals or making some alchemy, which further improves your understanding of the game world, my favorite research minigame is definitely the dissection one, that while really simple is actually a lot of fun The music is ok, I don't know much about music to make an opinion about it The gameplay is similar to other survival games like Don't Starve, it does it's job of keeping you interested in exploring without giving you total power over how you move, I don't love it nor hate it, some parts like picking up objects feels a bit clunky and the game needs some QoL changes but they didn't mess up my experience beyond a small ''come on just pick the item'' Now what I've really seen in these two hours that really set it apart is the exploration, there is some real sense of wonder in finding new things to research, learning new crafting recipes, dissecting a new animal or discovering new recipes While it may sound like a silly comparison it reminded me of discovering new things in the Minecraft mod Thaumcraft, you are just driven by this innate desire to learn more and more about the world, about what it has to offer to you and what possibilities you can reach while still making sure you make it out in one piece, seeing a new option in the research menu makes me go ''LET'S ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO'' even if it's something as simple as discovering that you can make plants and herbs into mush I'm gonna change/make a new review once I finish the game, maybe with some user score or something, but what I've seen in these little 2 hours has left me wanting for more

Game has a lot of interesting ideas, but they're horribly implemented. Very little is explained, and you're discouraged from experimentation because the crafting system is so tedious. You have to manually drag and drop each ingredient into a cauldron to brew potions, and those potions+more ingredients are used to create more potions and so on and so forth. Every step of the way you're dragging and dropping ingredients. It gets old REAL quick. The in game directions occasionally mislead you, which adds to the frustration. You need to craft and drink a potion whose effects are to put you into a coma. There is nothing in game telling you to do it, and doing so will kill you if you aren't wearing armor. Why? Who knows? At one point you need to collect a plant which makes your in game character flee in terror for reasons he can't explain. The solution? Drink booze before collecting the plant. This is not explained in game. You're constantly running into roadblocks like this. In a game about sci-fi and magic, I spent more than half my play time stabbing things with a stone axe and constantly applying bandages to cure petrification and several hours trying to figure out how to work the poorly implemented systems. This game should not have left early access in this condition.

The game is controversial — at first I wanted to recommend the game, but after getting tired with dealing with inverted drag of skill tree I changed my mind. It's a marker that creators have no education in game design. I don't like it, cause it leads to creating low-quality games. Pros: - interesting idea of discovery and research of items and materials - nice art style Cons: - bad game design (inverted drag of skill tree, excessive repeating of the same actions because of how crafting is designed, ugly in-game map, regions are divided by straight lines) - awful enemy's AI - poorly implemented fight mechanics

EDIT: I just blew past a roadblock that was preventing me from getting to the rest of the content. Disregard what I've said about the game being abandoned. I'll edit this review fairly once I'm done with the game. Hint: You can go into the tower. Caveat Emptor. I personally picked this game up for $3 USD on sale, and I'm not mad about it. What I'm mad about is that a potentially great game with fresh ideas appears to have been abandoned in development. So, Someone else pointed out that this game is like an unholy lovechild between Don't Starve and the Thaumcraft Mod (of Minecraft fame) and they are 100% correct. Except this game isn't nearly as hard as Don't Starve (which isn't really a bad thing) and it's not a tenth as fleshed out as Thaumcraft. The Good: There's some pretty cool fresh ideas here. Alchemy hasn't been done too well in survival games before, and I love that this game seems to have modeled itself after my favorite alchemical themed game. For the most part, it's exciting to unlock new branches of research through going out into the world and bringing back new flora and fauna to study. That's right... fauna. The monster autopsy feature is as exciting as it is rewarding and as far as I know, ENTIRELY ORIGINAL. Imagine having an epic battle with an exotic alien, and then dragging them back to your base to dissect them -manually, limb from organ, with the ever present possibility of failure - unlocking new research items, harvesting rare potion components, and learning enough about the alien to field strip their species in the future. Great mechanic, can't praise it enough. For this type of game, the graphics are fabulous! Some of the creature designs are very fresh and original, and as a bonus all of those interesting limbs and bony outcroppings become obstacles while you're dissecting them! The sound is fine. No perceivable positive or negatives on that end. I never play with the music on, so I can't speak on that. The bad: Things are poorly explained, and the player is frequently left scratching their head, grasping for the next step. There's some hitbox issues with resource nodes, the controls are absolutely whack and there's no good way to map them so that they don't suck. They could have combined the use/attack/harvest buttons and just used the context of which item you're holding to determine which action to perform. But instead, I'm forced to use three separate buttons to use whatever I'm ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ holding. Some of the monsters have ridiculous aggro ranges and move nearly as fast as you do. And this entire game is about being a crashlanded space alchemist, so you think there'd be some cool alchemist experimentation, but trial and error is so severely punished by LITERALLY BLOWING YOU UP when you fail to make something usable in the cauldron, even though there's an item that you can make to clear a bad recipe, you might as well just eat the explosion, because crafting that other item requires making it in the cauldron, and making things in the cauldron is super tedious because you have to drag every item individually for each and every potion, which would be super cool except the potions - while not entirely useless - give such a little in return for the time invested into their creation that they don't make any sense to actually craft. For instance, the only healing "potion" that you can craft is made of another prerequisite potion, with THE BONES OF A ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ SASQUATCH AND THE WINGS OF A GIANT ALIEN MURDER HORNET. WHAT THE ♥♥♥♥ IS THE POINT OF MAKING A HEALING ITEM OUT OF THINGS YOU HAVE TO HARVEST OFF OF MONSTERS THAT YOU HAVE TO FIGHT, which do more damage than the healing potion recovers with NEARLY EVERY HIT, and there's no way to avoid being hit, because - let's review - this is a clone of Don't Starve, not Dark Souls, so all of the combat is reduced to just trading hits with monsters. There's no passive health regeneration, and for a good portion of the game, you're slowly hemorrhaging health. Your only hope is the bandages that you can fashion out of the weeds that you can't go 5 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ meters without tripping over. Good thing they only do 50% of the healing of the aforementioned potions at 200% of the speed and about 2% of the player time invested. The same goes with pretty much all of the other potions. The ones that I tried all required exotic ingredients and prerequisite potion combinations, and the potion effect timer lasted about 5 seconds. That's not an exaggeration. 5. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Seconds. It takes longer to craft the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing, much less gather all the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ingredients. One of core attractions of the game is alchemy, and the alchemy sucks. The economy of player time investment is ENTIRELY broken. And the technology tier advancement appears to have gone unfinished/abandoned in development. There is one tier of armor. Two tiers of tools/weapon (I say "weapon" because, there is only one weapon per tier). There are two tiers of jewelry that advertise that you can enchant them, but since the enchantment system is never explained in the game, and I can't find any online resources on it - presumably unimplemented - those two tiers of jewelry are entirely useless! There are entire branches of the alchemy research tree that make items that do *gasp* nothing! It looked like whoever was making this game got frustrated and quit about a fifth of the way through development. The fact that they're trying to pass this off as a 1.0 release is... unfortunate. This game is VERY unfinished. Or no one has been able to figure it all out yet. I've been trying for awhile and I just can't find anything else to do in this game even though I'm nowhere near the initial goal of getting off the planet or saving my crewmates. And the wiki seems to have hit a brick wall as well.

Eh. There's some potential here which just ends up being wasted. It's like there was this grand idea with some mechanics around it... and then the dev forgot that you actually have to make a coherent game around it. Alright, that's a little harsh. If I had to describe it in one word, it's "unrefined". There's a certain mechanic which the game explains to you and it's not even implemented in the game (source: dev's admission in the forums). I figured I'd wait until that particularity gets fixed, but I've been waiting for 6 months and... I just figured the rest of the game is not really that good either. Combat is wonky, there aren't really any survival elements, the environments are uninteresting... the 'magic' parts are at least somewhat serviceable - and at times even exciting - but all in all it's just all very unrefined. That goes to show: it's not enough to have a good game idea. You also have to make sure that whatever you made is fun. And you do that by painstakingly examining and reexamining your game mechanics.

No. The tutorial sucks. Things are not fully explained, not enough time given before you end up dying while still trying to figure things out or what to do. This game begs for controller support. UI looks like its made for it. But nope! kb+m only. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I much prefer sitting on my couch with a controller. Game feels like a constant rush, there's no downtime! Hurry hurry hurry do some science before the next monster stumbles across you. Great concept, but don't like the end result. Could use a lot more polishing in my opinion.

I wanted to like this game it seemed promising so I picked it up during early access. The game feels very unfinished and I somehow soft locked my progress with not investing my gold in the right crafts before making a discovery, I've spent literal hours exploring looking for more gold that would be accessible to my character. There have not been any updates since the cartography update, and the game definitely needs a bit more polish.