Approximate amount of time to 100%: 5.5-7h
Estimated achievement difficulty: 2/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Has it been in a bundle: No
Is there a good guide available: Yes, the following two guides helped me out a lot:
guide 1 and
guide 2 How many people have completed this game at the time I'm writing this review: 2 on Astats
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty option
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No
This is a fun alchemist shop simulation game but it is more complicated than it needs to be. The developers are still working on this game, so, some things might be changing.
In
Alchemist Simulator you run the shop for your grandfather while he is gone for a while. You'll receive quests for potions via your letterbox but can only accept one quest at a time. It will tell you which potion(s) you need to make and what the components are of that specific potion. You then have to buy ingredients from the trader and work on those components. You'll start with 3 workstations; a cutting board, a mortar and a place to dry components. While playing through the quest, there will be 2 more workstations added to your shop and you can upgrade items to allow you to make them faster or give you more space.
Alchemist Simulator starts you off with a tutorial, which just explains to you what to do for the first potion, but somehow very quickly after that, I still managed to get stuck and only had the feeling that I understood half of the game. There's a guide on the Steam Forums that will tell you how to make each component, it helped me out a lot and I printed that one out after adding the symbols of each potion, just so I could quickly look up how to make each component during the game. For some people the part to sort out how to make each component might be fun, for me, it was just too complicated and I preferred to use this guide that just told me how to make them.
Something that added to some stress/frustration I felt, is the in-game time you have each day. There is a clock in your shop but you have to look up at it to see it and it isn't so clear how long you have left. I would've preferred to have a clock symbol at the top left corner of the screen at all times so that it clearly shows just how much time there is left, on any given day. This is important too because you can't save components between days. However, you can save ingredients that you've bought but have not worked on yet and you can also save potions but just not the components you made, from those ingredients. The game will also not tell you when the day is almost gone, so sometimes, I was quite far on with my potion-making, only then to have the game forcing me to go to sleep, which means starting all over again, with that same potion, the next in-game day. I would like to question how useful this day/night system is in this game and if it is not only adding frustration when it is not needed?
This all may sound very negative but I would like to stress; I did enjoy the game, once I got the guide for components printed out and I didn't take any risks with how many hours an in-game day may still have. I did prefer to just end a day, rather than try my luck and see if I could make a potion before it ends, only to fail.
The developers are thinking about a VR version if the game sells well and I think; a VR version might work out quite well.
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