ChemCaper™: Act I - Petticles in Peril

Disclaimer: I got this game in a bundle. This game has a lot of problems, both as a game and as a chemistry teaching tool. As a teaching tool, it's just not very good. There's very little in the game beyond what you might learn in middle school. The only really interesting compound petticle is water, and it's glossed over how miraculous water is. There's no other really interesting things and it doesn't really teach what the various bonds are and how they work in the real world. Most of the teaching here is just teaching you how to play the game. It doesn't do a great job of that either, but we'll get to that later. The limit of only 3 elements per petticle really hurts, and there are no carbon compounds at all. It's really odd to not see carbon dioxide, methane, iron oxide (or any iron compounds), various acids (hydrochloric, nitric, sulfuric), etc. Forget about alcohols or amino acids or really anything that would actually be "teaching chemistry." The lab processes are also terrible. They're not fun and they don't really teach anything about what you'd do in a lab. In particular I'm unsure why I'm decanting to separate liquids from solids in a potion instead of filtering. If I'm trying to separate liquids, I'm not sure why we chose decanting over simple distillation, since that's more educational (it's less obvious to a layperson). There's zero about lab safety which is pretty much the most important thing to actually teach, too. Onto the game stuff though. Hoo boy this game has some major problems. The game doesn't actually teach you that it's real-time combat at all; it gives its tutorial like it is turn-based. Also it allows you to click on a dead enemy, so extra clicks end up wasting attacks. You have to click, wait for the animation to finish to see whether you need to switch targets, then click again, all while the enemy is beating on you in real time. That seems like a mistake. There's no obvious way to restore HP without potions. The potion minigame is also super annoying. Some enemies occlude others because they're too big, making it hard to click on the enemy behind. The intro cutscene does absolutely nothing to explain to me anything about the game, whether educational or otherwise. The worst offender by far is this though: there seems to be no way to click past the "You got a new petticle!" pop-up screen. Literally you just have to sit there for an hour every time you want to create a new oxygen molecule and you need to craft petticles to level up. What's worse is that if you just hit ESC to cancel out, the pop-up window is STILL THERE when you go back to craft a new petticle. How the hell did this get past testing? The tutorials don't explain how equipping a sub-petticle actually affects your offense petticle actions. It wasn't obvious at first that potassium always has siphon, and oxygen is just changing the amount siphoned (while reducing the damage). It seems odd that a sub-petticle is not always a benefit. Also, it isn't clear why I can equip some petticles with sub-petticles but not others. I'm pretty sure it has to do with the two compounds reacting to form something else in actual chemistry, eg. oxidation reactions between oxygen and metals, but the game doesn't explain it at all (I'm not knowledgable enough to know if there's a potassium can be brominated but it would make more sense I guess). If that's the case, it's odd though that nitrogen and oxygen don't have any combos since there's quite a few nitrogen-oxygen compounds out there. Overall I can't give this a pass. If the game was a little better I'd be inclined to recommend it, even if the education elements were limited to 6th grade science class (which they are). I'd like to see more high school or low-level college chemistry rather than what's here, but the way it teaches chemistry doesn't actually teach any chemistry.