Take on the role of a novice student of alchemical arts, taking over the studio of your famous relative. Will you ever match his legend? Take the challenge to become the most famous alchemist in history...

Become a novice student of alchemical arts

Alchemist Simulator is a frustratingly overcomplicated game that's "fun" element isn't worth the time and effort you'll have to invest in it.

Graphically it looks rather good. It's a first person game where you wander around your small cottage which houses all the tools to whip up a batch of potions at a moments notice.

The opening tutorial is about as shallow as you can get. It gives you the (very) basics and then you're left alone to fathom out the rest on your own.

The first problem is that the indicators, that show you where you are on the menus, is almost impossible to see. So if you're wanting to buy ingredients the slight colour change is almost impossible to spot. Likewise on the options menu everything is incredible small. In fact, check those when you start because for some reason the default was stuck on no sound and no music, which meant I spent the first 20 minutes with no sound coming out of the game.

When I first ordered my ingredients they seemed to fly towards me. So naturally, like with any other game I've ever played, I assumed I now had them on my person. I went over to the chopping table to discover no matter what button I pressed I couldn't access the ingredients I thought I was carrying. In frustration I wandered around the room to find they had been placed on a shelf. In fairness, if you watch carefully, you'll see that the items float from the delivery box into the preparation room.

Check your recipe book to ensure you use the right ingredients

One of the ingredients needed me to dry it by the window... and then, because I'd obviously taken too long, the day was over and I was forced to go to sleep. The next day I wandered downstairs to carry on where I'd left off... The drying ingredient was nowhere to be found. So I started from scratch.

When I finally finished the tutorial I thought that maybe this was part of the game - that it gives you the basics and you have to use trial and error to work things out. And to be honest that does sound like an interesting challenge... However...

The second potion I had to make was simple enough to work out what ingredients I needed. However extracting the part you needed seem to be hit and miss and I couldn't fathom it despite trying several different ways. This is the point I would have normally just thrown in the towel and moved onto something less boring instead.

Mix your potions in the cauldron

But I persevered, despite every fibre of my being screaming at me to stop immediately. When I picked up an ingredient I had wrongly cut or mixed I couldn't work out how to discard it. My character just kept holding it out in front of me until I put it into the cauldron (which would mean that my potion would be wrong when I added further ingredients to it. So, after fudging the potion I went to order more ingredients... but they had run out of the ones I wanted. No problem, I naively thought, I just need to end the day... but no. That didn't work either.

Ignoring all of these major issues, the game just isn't interesting or deep enough. You end up just doing the same old actions time and time again, but with different ingredients It gets old real fast.

A travesty of a game that could have been challenging, fun and entertaining. It ends up just being a pretty, yet confusing mess.

2

Nick Smithson