Nora: The Wannabe Alchemist

The first time I played this, it failed to save correctly and I lost a few hours of play. The developer refused to help, on the grounds that they simply hadn't seen the issue before. Note that this game has only a few hundred players, so it should not be considered unusual for a bug to be reported only a single time. Later, my negative review was deleted without any notice to me. I gave it a second chance, but found it tedious and poorly balanced. There is only one potion of any economic value, and it only requires one plant to make it. There's almost no point in growing any of the other plants. Once you unlock the candy maker, you will find that all your potion orders are uneconomical. Everyone wants candy, which requires honey to manufacture, but honey can only be acquired by fulfilling potion orders to fairies. Unfortunately, the fairies' orders also contain candy, and that candy would require more honey to make than they are offering as payment. So, once you unlock the candy maker, you can't get honey anymore, and you can't fulfill any custom orders. The UI is annoying and buggy. The main quest is to grind until you have a ton of money. It takes about 10 hours to reach this point and 100% the game (actually 96%, because 4 achievements are impossible). Then the game will say "End of the current content. Stay tuned for updates!" There have been no non-trivial updates since 2022. This is a fully 2D game. It doesn't take a year and a half to make a major content update, even if you only have one developer.

[i]Nora: The Wannabe Alchemist[/i] is a cute time management/visual novel hybrid where you play as Nora, a witch who gets expelled from witchcraft school but strives to become a famous alchemist. [h3]The Story[/h3] In this cool mash-up of visual novel meets time management you play as Nora, a wannabe alchemist despite her klutzy nature. At the very beginning of the game you are kicked out of a witchcraft school and with nowhere else to go move back to the house you shared with your grandma, and which is much in need of repair and cleaning. From here you head into town to meet the locals who help you start your journey. [h3]Game-play & Features[/h3] At the start of the game you unlock the workshop. This is the place where, once harvested, you use the plants and ingredients from your garden to make potions for the townsfolk. This is where you make your money in the game to continue buying new plants and items from the shopkeeper. In the beginning the coin you make is minimal, and so begins the grind. There are no penalties for taking as many days as you need to harvest (thankfully) and make potions. The time management part starts when you click harvest and only have so much time to collect all the plants. Each plant provides two types of flower, if you let the flower sit it will further mature into the second form. But like in life, plants will wither with too much time. Nora has limited amounts of mana and this is what you have to monitor besides the health of your plants. You can use a mana recovery potion (so keep some in your inventory once crafted). Your inventory is limited so there is a bit of inventory management in this game. You can increase your bag space but only by 10 slots at a time. You also need to pay coins to unlock new plant plots to grow new plants. There are collectable items like leaves, feathers, fruit and butterflies! A nice touch. [i]For ultra widescreen users change the mode to windowed and change the resolution to scale down to a comfortable window size. The game at full screen on an ultra wide screen looks stretched and the text does not fit neatly within the text box at full view.[/i] [h3]The Grind is Real[/h3] The grind is frustrating in this game, it takes a while to gather enough coins to buy anything. Thankfully the first plant is free and you can get a replacement if it withers (and it probably will). The time you get to harvest before your plants wither is way too fast, and this is extra frustrating with multiple plants on the go and they all wither and grow flowers/fruit at different rates. [h3]The Visuals & Audio[/h3] This game is a delight visually, with whimsical illustrations that are colorful and magical. Like pictures in a fantasy book for children. Really enjoyable to look at. The music too is upbeat and goes with the theme of the game. [h3]Overall Experience[/h3] A cute idea to mesh a visual novel with a time management game. The grind is real, as in most time management games but the rate at which the plants wither is so fast and it gets frustrating with multiple plants on the go. I recommend this game with the caveat that you are informed about the grind involved and you expect it. The game overall is not without its charms, like the premise of the story and the artwork. And I am sure like other games in this genre you can craft potions at later stages to slow down plant growth rates to make harvesting more enjoyable. It is just having enough patience for the grind to get that far. 🌺 Otome Lovers wishes to thank [i]Error 300[/i] for providing a free review copy for this game. [quote]Please follow our curator page, [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/4680120/]Otome Lovers[/url], if you'd like to see more reviews like this one! [/quote]

I found this game on the switch at first, got frustrated with how long each screen was taking to load and got on steam. From first impression, the game has pretty art, a story line and things for you to do - great! I enjoyed the little jokes in the spam mail, dialogue and small things that made this game's world feel more lived in. However, the longer i played i started to notice that the game just.. progresses ahead of you. The first plant is 25 gold to buy, the second one 150, and the third one... 900 gold??????????? when i saw this, i thought "okay, this must be a rare plant and meant to be gotten towards the end of the game'', it wasn't. Customers would come and request potions that include this 900 gold plant but obviously i cant get it because i just started this game, resulting in a loop of turning away 90% of your customers. It kind of demotivates you, you have all these potions being unlocked but you cant even craft any of them because the game is just moving toooooo fast! I will also mention that you can get soft-locked if you dont know any better, my first 25 gold plant withered (i got distracted lol) and i had no way to make money, i couldnt dig it up, nothing because i had 0 gold! so i restarted. The game is creative and i enjoy the idea! if the dev were to add more variants and properly paced game progression, it would be a fun game to play! but despite that i think it might need more time before it can be enjoyable to play, so for now i would not recommend it until an update.

A cute game and fun to start out with, but feels pretty sloggy to make money. Maybe it's just bad luck with customer requests for potions, but trying to sell potions to the store is barely worth it. I keep thinking about going to play it more (under an hour so far), but grinding out to earn the ability to grow more needed herbs doesn't sound that much fun. So, kind of recommended, but with hesitation.

玩到此时此刻，你就会发现。 原来这游戏，它只做了两章就放上来了。 没有后续，没有结局，有的只是年度统计时的完成成就数+100

So far it is a fun little game of quests and potions.. I am still on early access and have reached the end of the storyline so... more game play needed to give a full review

Looking forward to Chinese, it is easy to play, and the plot brings out the venue and decoration content. Like this content very much, the correction about the stuck dialogue please developer fix it thanks

Very grindy, very frustrating in a lot of parts. It says it's out of early access but it's an incomplete game. The music is good but there are errors that make me genuinely mad. The quests are also not streamlined well enough, and I had to stumble onto some areas by myself completely, without any hints on what to do. And the fact that you get your plants stolen a bunch of times in the swamp SUCKS because those plants are expensive. The kids may enjoy it, but it just left me frustrated.

I was really excited about this game, but the mechanics are just not good and I'm bored. It's really cute, and I want to love it, but I got bored really fast. (It says I've only played for 79 minutes but I think that's really wrong, It was more like 5-7 hours, a whole afternoon) Going back and forth between the different buildings over and over again gets old really fast. The story line felt unpolished and this level of button clicking grind is just not interesting to me. I might pick it up again later, but for now it's uninstalled :(

I am enjoying it! The grind begins when you start working towards the Poison Protection, but its a cute calming sort of grind! I really appreciate the non-copyright claimed background music!!!! Wish more developers cared about this! Thank you again!