Alchemist Simulator Review

For something that isn’t real, we’ve got very set ideas of what alchemy is. To us, it’s about foraging around for eye of newt and phoenix feathers, jumbling them together into an unholy cocktail, watching a puff pop out of the top of the vial (extra points if that puff is a skull and crossbones) and using it to become Mr Hyde, turn coal into gold, or make people fall in love. It’s potion make-believe, and the idea of a ‘simulator’ gets our alchemical juices flowing.

Alchemist Simulator doesn’t disagree with that impression of alchemy. But it only focuses on a very small part of it, cutting off and clearing away some of the bits that might have been exciting. It cuts off so much, in fact, that what’s left can be too dry for consumption. 

For a game with ‘simulator’ in the title, this is a remarkably concise game. You are the daughter of an alchemist, and he has buggered off on his travels without so much as a goodbye. That leaves you in charge, but you’ve never touched a pestle and mortar in your life, so you are learning the ropes. 

Written quests come to you via a letterbox which, while they have a certain amount of charm, damages the fantasy. Who are we making the potions for? Why don’t we get to see the effects of them? Sure, having emerged from a period of lockdown, it almost feels natural to be seeing no-one and leaving potions in a box for others to pick up. But the inverse would have been magnitudes more interesting. Imagine regulars changing as they feel the effects of our magic. It’s all so impersonal.

Those quests require the making of one or more potions. These potions have a kind of recipe: several icons that need to be present in the vial when the potion is made. But these icons aren’t necessarily easy to get hold of. They come from ingredients, bought from a rat in the library, but those ingredients always have more than one icon present. So a chopping board is used to carve off the unwanted icons and retain those that are needed, before tossing the ingredient into a cauldron. 

But it gets more complicated than that. Often there is no ingredient with the icon that is needed. So, it is time to turn to a chart, proudly pasted on the wall of the laboratory, that shows how icons can be transmuted. Drying an ingredient on some paper makes it less potent, so the icon moves down the chart, becoming a new icon. Grinding the ingredient in a pestle and mortar makes it more potent, so the icon moves up the chart, again becoming a new icon. Choosing the right ingredient and then chopping or transmuting is the name of the game here. 

Except, what we’ve just told you is endlessly more helpful than the tutorial that Alchemist Simulator gives you. For reasons that we can’t surmise, it doesn’t explain why you are doing the things you are doing: just how to do them. So, the notion of moving up and down potency, of using the process to remove icons as well as change them, is something you have to figure out yourself. Alchemist Simulator is as opaque as a mud stew. 

That’s without mentioning controls. Alchemist Simulator was clearly designed as a PC game. You interact with the various gubbins around the lab with a tiny reticule, but it’s woefully inaccurate and awkward. The chopping board has various settings that allow you to change the icons you chop ‘out’, but these are miniscule buttons that are fiddly to press. Grind something in the pestle and mortar, and a pouch of small granules pops out like a toaster, but they’ve got such a small click area that we constantly failed to pick them up. 

But none of this is as befuddling as the interfaces. Open a quest, and you have to read to the bottom before you can sign it and accept it: something the game neglects to teach you, and which is slow and – again – awkward. When there are two quests to choose between, it is almost impossible to move between them and read them both. Meanwhile, the game’s alchemy journal, proudly placed on a pedestal, is broken. It’s necessary to move between tabs and pages, as this is a vital source of information, but Alchemist Simulator regularly stopped bothering to show us what was highlighted, and occasionally crashed altogether. We had to open and reopen the journal just to fix it. The shop page, accessible from the rat in the library, isn’t much better.

Alchemist Simulator is painful to learn and painful to master, thanks to the absence of help and the nobbly controls. But suck it up and it’s not an atrocious game. That’s mostly down to the central puzzle: figuring out which ingredient gets you closest to your goal, and then processing it. This is often a headscratcher, and going step-by-step through the process can become second nature. It even gets close to fun. There are still rough edges, even in this central loop – new machines that you unlock add virtually nothing, and it’s absolutely possible to reach zero cash and have limited options for getting out of that hole – but we occasionally felt like a practicing witch, which was what we wanted in the first place.

But only occasionally did we feel this way. And that’s the core disappointment with Alchemist Simulator. Games like the Atelier series know that alchemy is wild and imaginative: it’s about ludicrous ingredients, overblown chemical reactions, and then seeing the fantastical fruits of our labours. But none of that is here. This is too methodical and dry, and it could have been so much more.

There’s a reason so many games dabble in alchemy. There’s the foraging for ingredients, the making of bubbling concoctions, and finally seeing what they do. But Alchemist Simulator opts for only the middle stage of this process, and reduces it to the step-by-step following of a cookery manual. There is a strong idea at the heart of Alchemist Simulator, but it plays things too safe to really see the sparks fly.

You can buy Alchemist Simulator from the Xbox Store for Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S

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• Source: https://www.thexboxhub.com/alchemist-simulator-review/