You can't beat the price, I tell you what. "What."
I just told you what. Ha!
Okay, seriously, you take your chances with a "free" game but I like that this just went off and did its own thing. I don't want to use "artistic" but in a world crowded with KILLING OF WAR and CUTE COZY EXPLOITATION it's genuinely nice, actually refreshing, to experience a game that carves off a little slice of intellectual real-estate and sets up shop.
I bet that sentence didn't make sense to you. That's got to set up a ramble.
Back in the day, before I was writing all these rambling reviews and yelling at people professionally for pay, I studied chemistry. I got smart and moved over to computational chemistry quickly but I've loved the hands-on aspect of chem labs since day 1. I kind of miss it and I think in a different universe, I am a very happy lab tech.
This game is about making alchemical mixtures. It's got some basic tools of the trade, a mortar/pestle, some test tubes, a few beakers, boxes of ingredients. Things are really tactile, though: you need to actively bash the pestle into the ingredients to moosh them up. You need to stir up the cubes of salts. Things have fluid capacity and needs to be poured from one to the next, though there's a funnel to help avoid spills. Half-used ingredients linger on the table and things stay where you leave them, so it's possible to get enormously disorganized in a hurry.
And some compounds are a bit dangerous, prone to exploding if overshaken (though you really do need to work at it), or evaporating if too bright and exposed to light. It is so very tactile!
It's a little clumsy in places, mind you, and the fluid physics are a bit basic but does account for viscosity, which is also something you can control. Pouring off a very gloopy mixture amused me greatly.
The way the game is rendered really brings out this old CGA feel, with enormous levels of dithering. That may not mean much to you, so I'll just say that olden-tymey PC games did kind of look like that! Though with way, way fewer colours, usually only cyan, magenta and black. You have no idea how much things have advanced, I tell you what.
I have only a few minor issues with this game, and considering how free this game is, you can probably stop here. Foremost is the "voice", it's aiming for that random phoneme babble sound. Except they're only using one audio channel and their clips are too long, so instead of "boobeeblahblah" as you might expect, it's more like "boo. bee. blah. blah." Well, they're weird monsters, maybe they're enunciating slowly for the human alchemist. And it can be clicked-through, so as long as you know what they want, you're golden anyway.
Tiny nubbins of ingredients can be difficult to find and getting rid of them requires pitching them off the desk. There's physics on how things fly about, and the "interaction" radius is maybe a bit generous. There's no time limits, so a little patience will do you.
I may not have been bright enough to work out a few of the recipes based on their clues. Part of it was that they translated "meter" as "bobble". (The scale has meters at the bottom.)
And, lastly, I really felt the game was too short. I'd probably buy a much longer version of this... maybe with a lot less CGA-style dithering, and less screen-shake (the final alchemy is a bit annoying with all the thumping). My willingness to pay for a free game ought to be worth two thumbs up. Make of that what you will.
Anyway, if you're down here, you're my kind of crazy. Check out my profile, I do some other online stuff, and I'd love to see you as you're clearly my sort of person. Advertising directly here, on a free game, feels a bit crass. (TWO THUMBS UP!)
