Alchemia: Creatio Ex Nihilo Reviews

Game is pretty fun, but is buggy. Crafting the Hero's Mixture from a 50/50 guess seems to crash every time.

It's definitely worth a look. I'll be interested to see what more they do with it. Right now it's just very repetitive, which I think will be less of an issue as more types of encounters and such are added to the game as it goes through Early Access into full development.

Oh my god this is so good what the hell. I love how all monsters are challenging, I love how every turn has so many possibilities, I love how acts don't have too many encounters but they're a little bit longer, I love how the first boss pretty much requires you to master the game up to that point instead of steamrolling it because I'm used to deckbuilders and I LOVE how the game expanded past the first act. I don't know if the game is gonna have a lot of longevity because it's already getting a little repetitive after a couple of hours given you always use the same recipes. But I don't care much because learning and mastering the game is so much fun. 9/10 (My only small suggestion [spoiler]would be to rework the substitute to be a permanent rule "everything can substitute a lesser element" and make the act 1 recipes require tier 0 ingredients. Nothing would change in the gameplay and you wouldn't have to specify it on every single element which is gonna take up a lot of room if more higher tiers are adder later on. This is coming from someone who has only reached act 2 so idk if something later is gonna break this suggestion but so far it seems like an improvement.(Or just make the starting ingreadients Tier 1 because that barely makes a difference.))[/spoiler]

Changing the review from negative to positive. I liked the dev's response to my criticisms. Plus, I still play the game, so I guess I do still like it. It does have some fun strategic elements to it. ------------------ Old review: Dragging reagents into the grid, just to do 1 attack or defend, gets old really fast. "well you don't have to keep doing it once you master a recipe" Not true. Once you die and start a new game you get to relearn all the recipes again.

Amazing game! It's a great twist on the deck building genre with recipes you can discover yourself. Took me around 10 hours to beat the last boss, so I think the difficulty is on point. I'm excited for more content in the future :)

Excellent game! I`m loving the gameplay loop, it`s very fun and addictive. The music is also super nice. Looking forward to what the devs are adding in the future!

While initially interesting, this game is unfortunately easily solved in it's current state once you find the appropriate recipe [spoiler] it's the one that takes 2 reagents and draws 3. With this, you can easily go infinite, especially since the damage goes away once you master it [/spoiler] Deck thinning always being accessible once you find the shop node combined with the fact that you always have access to recipes and base reagents means that I can go for this strategy every time, enemies have no chance of defeating me, and the game devolves into a tedious slog. This, in addition to bugs and crashes, means I can't recommend this game at this time

Slay the Spire with Mystery Sell Crafting. I like how many of the spells you uncover start as a bit of a mystery. You know it requires, say, these 3 components, but you aren't told how they need to be placed. You then can hold off on that spell until you learn that spell completely or, in the heat of battle, play around with those spell components when drawn and HOPE you can hit upon the correct placement to trigger the spell. Get the placement of those components wrong guess and you'll have essentially wasted a turn in which some known spells maybe could have been cast instead.

tl;dr it's pretty good, and a nice twist on a formula, but not nearly as deep, variable, or polished as some of its competitors. Given the other options out there, I'd recommend $8 to $10 instead of the current price. I beat the 3rd boss once, after about 10 hours of total play, so the difficulty seems about right. The game isn't super-polished, and I think there are probably some balance problems. but the gimmick of "crafting" each of your actions is actually pretty well fleshed out. It's not just a veneer over the standard Slay the Spire type of deckbuilder. On the other hand, as far as I can tell right now, there aren't wildly different builds to work with. For example, it'd be hard to imagine a run where you didn't need a lot of both the defense reagents and the primary attack reagents. So whereas the games this clearly took inspiration from can feel very different from run to run, this game seems to be more about optimizing within a limited band of viable options. The game has some bugs and typos. In particular the enemies in the 3rd area could use more playtesting. Burning is too powerful (it seems that only a couple of artifacts can prevent you from taking insane damage). Confusion has a bug which causes recipes from the book to no longer function properly. Both of these are debuffs in the 3rd area. In terms of suggestions for balance/rework, I'd suggest ditching the invigorating root and replacing its recipes somehow. It seems like it would almost always be a bad idea to aim for anything beyond the first healing recipe. Nerf burning. Rework the shop, because it's very expensive to get hints but there's little other reason to spend gold. Perhaps offer one upgraded reagent for every 3 regular reagents you pay to remove? I haven't unlocked all the recipes yet so it's possible I'm missing some key options with the other specialized ones.

Tentative no while we wait for more content. If you're here because you like Roguelike XBuilders, then this game will leave you feeling a little let down, mostly because the otherwise interesting mechanics are utterly devoid of replayability. First, lets go over the core mechanic: This game's unique mechanic is dressed up as Alchemy, and revolves around the concept of concepts of Reagents and Recipes. Recipes are what do the deck builder style effects: "Gain 9 bock" or "Deal 11 damage to all enemies". Recipe effects occur when you arrange specific reagents (the things you actually build your deck out of) into specific configurations. Which reagents cause which recipes is always the same between runs, but the pattern they must be arranged into mixed up. You start out only knowing a few base recipes, but you can get hints about the others at shops (in fact, this is the only thing you can buy at shops other than reagent removal). Hints aren't the only way you can learn recipes though- if you know the required reagents, you can just brute force solve for their pattern. Once you use a recipe enough times, you 'master it'. This means that recipe becomes a bit more powerful, as well as you gain the QoL feature of pinning it to your bar so you don't have to rifle through your recipe book in order to find the recipe when you want to cast it. The game has a ton of meta progression. Both in that you start with some recipes partially remembered once you cast them enough across all your games, and you get to spend the points you get on death unlocking either new recipes, new relics, or new node types on the map. The Problem: The reason I'm giving this game a negative review is because in its current state, the game seems so concerned with its innovative definition of the "Deck" part of "Deckbuilding" that it forgot to deliver on the "Building" part. There are only like... 12 recipes in the starting zone. Of those 12 recipes, you start with 3, can trivially guess 4, will never or rarely use... 5 of them, and can get hints unlocking the rest before your first elite fight. As for the reagents there are technically 6, but that includes two consumable reagents you'll rarely use (and certainly never make deck building decisions around) and the red-headed-stepchild Poison reagent which similarly is rarely used. That leaves you with three reagents you'll be using to evoke the same 4 recipes every turn. This means that almost every single run through the first act is identical. This means that the first act VERY QUICKLY becomes a tedious swamp of stalling fights while you brute force certain recipes while you just explore the entire map (you're never forced to choose a path on the map, you are free to explore everything you've seen in any order). There is almost literally no variation, and there are very literally no important decisions to make. Even the already small relic pool is so bloated with easily ignorable chaff that when you do get to pick between two relics, it feels like a fake decision. The Problem with my Problem: My criticism isn't damning. I'm very aware that the game might feel small and linear to me because I haven't unlocked enough stuff. It seems like there is a pretty significant ladder of meta progression to unlock new map nodes, new recipes, and new relics. However I think its entirely unreasonable to expect people to do your meta progression grind if you're not going to put a premium on replayability. I also think the core mechanics are pretty cool. I think all of the issues I raise here can be fixed, and likely will once they like... triple the amount of content in the first act, and overhaul the recipe-unlock system. This is one to keep an eye on.