Alchemist Simulator Review (Nintendo Switch)

Game: Alchemist Simulator
Genre: Simulation, Puzzle, First-Person
System: Nintendo Switch (also on Steam)
Developers | Publishers: Art Games Studio, polyslash | Art Games Studio
Age Rating: US E | EU 3+
Price: US $12.49 | UK £11.29 | EU € 12,49
Release Date: March 11th, 2021

Review code used, with many thanks to Art Games Studio

Alchemist Simulator released on Steam in 2020, is a simulation game by developers Art Games Studio.

Double, Double Toil and Trouble

In this first-person game, you play as a novice student of alchemical arts, taking over the studio of your famous relative. As an alchemist, you have to prepare potions and complete quests on a daily basis.

You’re taken through a tutorial by the shopkeeper who happens to be a talking rat. This starts with you picking up a quest from your mailbox. And that’s where my problems began. You see, you’re told to accept your first quest, which I did. But you are not told to accept the quest you need to put a signature at the bottom of the quest page by moving the L stick left. So that took a while to work out!

Fire Burn

After that, the rat shows you the Almanac which contains spells and information about ingredients. You then are walked through your first potion-making session. The game in its entirety takes place in the alchemist workshop. There are a total of 5 stations to use to make portions. The knife board, the mortar, the dryer, the cleaner and the juicer. You start with the knife, mortar and dryer and unlock the other two as you level your Fame up

As you complete quests successfully your Fame increases, which in turn leads to you being able to accept more high-end quests and allow you to use all the equipment. The game also runs on a day-night cycle so you must go to bed each night. If you don’t, you fall asleep and are magically transported to bed.

Cauldron Bubble

The rat is also the shopkeeper from whom you purchase your ingredients. Once bought they magically appear in a crate where you collect them and they whizz on to the shelf at your workstation. You can get to work on making your first portion, I say make but, really, all you do is add an item to the chopping board and watch an animation of the knife cutting the item. You use the chopping board that has element sections around the side of it to remove Aspect chains from an item. Then you can dry it at the drying window and if needed use the mortar to grind it down. And finally, all your ingredients go into the cauldron over the fire.

The uses of segments around the side of the chopping board aren’t fully explained to you, so you just muddle about making mistakes and using up ingredients that you have to buy. There is a large chart over the work station that will show elements on it, but as you can only view it from a distance you can’t see it properly, so it is only there for decoration.

In the Cauldron Boil and Bake

Alchemist simulator is a first-person game, so you rely on the cursor to click on items and to be able to use the work station and so on. However, the cursor in the game is a little tiny, tiny white dot on the screen, which isn’t much help as you can’t find it sometimes depending on the background it is against.

I enjoyed the several unique mechanics with the different stations, though I did struggle at some points with trying to figure out some of the methods on my own. The first few potions to be made are fairly simple drinks in order to accumulate the required cash to be able to buy more ingredients.

Visuals and Controls

Alchemist Simulator is a port of the PC game and the game looks fine if a little flat on the Nintendo Switch. After all, it is only a few rooms inside of the Alchemists house you see, though what you do see gives off the impression of an oldy worldy look that you would associate with a potion brewing setting.

Controlling the game is done via the joy-cons and for the most part, they work, if you can find the cursor they work even better! Unfortunately, the game plays like a PC game without the controls being updated to suit the Nintendo Switch, they just don’t feel intuitive to me.

Conclusion

Once you do get into a pattern of making potions and completing the quests Alchemist Simulator is quite fun. I love the premise of Alchemist Simulator, who doesn’t want to be an Alchemist. However, with controls that feel like they have been lifted straight from a PC game.

The tutorial doesn’t prepare the player with enough information on the ins and outs of brewing potions, which is a pity as underneath the faults the gameplay could be interesting. At the moment, the way the game is, I’m giving it a score of

Final Verdict: I’m Not Sure