RPG Alchemy Reviews

Exactly what it claims to be and it's great!

Interesting take on the original Alchemy style game.

Nice game where you combine two things to get something else. It is not too long and there is a filter which removes unusable items to make things easier. Starting with 3 things you need to find all combinations to unlock 184 things. Devs were pretty active right after release, few issues that I reported (two achievements not triggering and some other minor issues) were fixed in a matter of hours during Saturday. Game is about 3-4 hours long but it was interesting and ended before I got bored with it.

Fun little game to play while trying to stave off boredom! Although there are some questionable combinations (like Priest+Dragon=Party???), the game is still fun and while I have gotten all the achievements, I haven't gotten all the combos yet!

This is a mostly inoffensive time waster, but it falls short of its admittedly basic premise. For a game like this to work, you need two things: fun combinations that offer up a knowing wink and a nod to the player and a nice, responsive interface to make the admittedly simple task of clicking two things fun. Sadly, the game fails on both of those accounts. The items are entertaining enough, but there are a lot of combinations that don't yield any results even when they seem like they should. For example, adventurer + mob = loot and XP. Okay, XP + XP equals level up. Level up and adventurer does nothing. There are a lot of seemingly dead-end pairings like this, but even the logic driving them is unusual. You can level up mobs but not the party; an abstraction has gone awry. Even so, the interface really holds it back. Serviceable is a generous term. It's hard to overstate how important QoL is to any experience. Still, when your experience is "click on two things," you know you messed up when you often have to click on four things several times. Clicks don't always register, and searching for pairs requires swapping categories or changing pages by clicking arrows. There also needs to be features like, what if I don't want to do a pairing? This might sound trivial, but the game is about clicking on two things. Whether that's a masterclass in game design doesn't matter. You can also eat a sandwich with just two pieces of bread: even if your game is basic, the user experience matters. The bare minimum is literal here, and it further hurts an already dull experience by making it tedious. So, no. I can't recommend it, especially when the developers seem to know this. There's a feature in the game that admits both of these flaws: the lock button. You could do what I complained about and fiddle with a lousy interface searching for inconsistent pairings, *or* you can pick an option, lock it, and then click through every other item. Tragically, this feature highlights that the *best* way to "play" is to lock an item and then select every other item, rinse and repeat. I again stress the "fun" of these games is finding the silly pairings that result in recognizable tropes. If the most efficient way to do that is rote elimination, there's still more work to be done. This is not a professional title. It has limited SFX, animation, and appeal, but simple is not synonymous with bad. I gave the game a shot because I wanted to play a simple game. I was let down not because it's basic but because it is badly designed. Seeing more of your options without scrolling, having a more responsive interface to look for the pairings, a smidge of animation or helpful features like canceling a pairing aren't incredible technologies. They would, however, move the needle here quite a bit.