REVIEW | Alchemist Simulator

LifeisXbox’s Alchemist Simulator review | Alchemist Simulator is a simulator developed by Art Games Studio and published by Polyslash. You’ll find yourself working unexpectedly at your grandfather’s laboratory because he had to leave for London for a while, to take a tour around the world. You yourself haven’t finished your training as an alchemist yet, but you’ll have to overcome that, and keep the lab up and running until he returns from his grand adventure. Through your grandfather’s journey, you’ll have to aid him by sending him the required potions for certain situations he finds himself in.

Most Memorable Moment

The game started off very slowly for me; I had to keep looking at the aspects chart for a little while before I started making my potions. After a few hours of playing the game, however, I started getting better and faster at this! I even got to the point where I barely had to look at the chart! Despite knowing the chart at that point, I still had to think a little while before buying ingredients for my potions.

ℹ️ Reviewed on Xbox Series X | Review code provided by PR/publisher, this review is the personal opinion from the writer.

What we Liked!

• Variety of potions | Alchemist Simulator has over 30 different potions, all with different recipes. Some potions only need 2 ingredients, but some need up to 4. That may not sound like much at all, until you realise how you have to use these ingredients. There’s a chart with different aspects, all categorised into different categories; life & death, heat & cold, order & chaos, and purity & corruption. When the game starts you’ll have the ability to cut, crush and dry ingredients. Cutting allows you to remove maximum one category, but is not required. With the mortar, you’ll be able to crush your ingredients, allowing them to increase in max 1 aspect, however, this limit can be upgraded to a max of 3 later on in the game. And the dryer allows you to downgrade one aspect of an ingredient, one at a time, which can be used as long as you have min 1 aspect on your ingredient.
  Through these 3 devices, you’ll have to be able to match the aspects of your ingredients with the ones in the recipes. You’ll start off slowly, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to make these faster and faster.

• Engaging missions | This game is filled with missions. You have 2 kinds of missions; main- and side-missions. The main-missions will follow the story of your grandfather’s travels. You’ll need to provide him with potions that he’ll need though his journey. The side-missions also have stories, but instead of one big story, these will all have smaller story-lines. Thanks to all these missions you’ll be able to discover more and more recipes to help you out!

Mixed Feelings

• Very repetitive | Despite all the different potions and all of the missions, the game felt fairly repetitive. There are a lot of potions and missions, but since there are more missions than potions, you’ll find yourself making the same potions multiple times. Some aspects are also overused, meaning that you’ll have to use the same progress to make an aspect multiple times, for different ingredients, which can get a little tiring after a while.

• Decent graphics and sound | While the graphics don’t look too complicated or demanding, I really liked the art style. The music was also quite enjoyable – there are a few tracks for every day in the game. I did find there to be a lack of sound effects; the world around you doesn’t really feel alive. What do I mean by that? Well, you only hear yourself and the things you touch – the game can use some more ambient noise, like wind, or the house cracking, …

What we Disliked

• Confusing tutorial | When you first start off, Alchemist Simulator can sound very complicated. Sadly, the text-based tutorial isn’t too clear on what you have to do, despite all of its efforts. What could’ve helped, are simple arrows and indicators that guide you through your first few potions. I kinda had to figure out on my own where things were. For example, I just couldn’t find the dryer when I had to use it for the first time, because I didn’t know what it’d look like.

How long to beat the story | 7 – 8 hours
How long to achieve 1000G | 8 – 10 hours