Nora: The Wannabe Alchemist Reviews

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 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.