I only played one run of AA, but that was more than enough for me to decide that I did not want to play anymore. It lasted ~4 hours. I enjoyed the first hour or two. According to the achievement, I reached the Church of Sulfur which at the time of writing. I assume this is about midgame as ~15% of players have reached it, but it is hard to tell. My run ended when I decided that I did not want to keep playing after I misplaced my phoenix feather, and let a minotaur kill me.

Alchemist's Alcove has a nice hook, some cool spritework, and some fun ideas, but it fails to execute in a fun way. The crafting system feels like the developers played "Doodle God" or "Infinite Craft," and then decided to make it painfully tedious to play. To clarify, the crafting tree itself was a lot of fun. It's the actual gameplay that was miserable. There are items all over the floor, all the time, in every cleared room. This becomes a problem quickly. The games mechanics encourage you to hoard items within empty rooms with an item portal system that feels like a bizzaro work around for a menu. Within these item lairs, you then have interact with the crafting system under arbitrarily monotonous mechanics. You need to have at least one item that you are crafting with in your inventory. If an item you need is behind other items, you must walk over and pick that item up. On the way over, your character will fill its inventory with anything that it walks across for no reason. The game implements a specific key press to pick things up. There is no reason to pick things up on contact. The game also showcases that it is capable of having an item and a player occupy the same tile, so it is not a technical issue. When I was finally able to craft an item, it was exciting! This is what kept me playing for as long as I did. Looking at the sprite, reading the flavor text, and trying to figure out what items did was fun until I realized, that actually using the items... was anything but.

Combat in this game is incredibly shallow. It boils down to whoever brings the bigger stick wins. Every room is an empty square. There is no line of sight or other hiding mechanics as far as I could tell. There is no outrunning enemies. There is no resource management because items are abundant. You don't even have to manage your health outside of the early game because the enemies should be disintegrated before they can even reach you or you lose. Even with enemy weaknesess, resistances, and infighting, the combat still fails to deliver because there is no choice. There is no outplay. You have either crafted the appropriate item or you have not. Enemies only exist to ensure that the player has spent enough time interacting with the terrible crafting system to be allowed to continue.

Overall there is a lot to like about the game, especially in the artistic/atmosphere department, but it is riddled with beyond questionable design choices that make the game feel more like a chore than something I would do willingly.

What a weird quirky game. If you enjoy organizing things it's oddly satisfying. Finding new recipes also hits that dopamine switch.

Makes me want to jot down notes in a notebook.

That being said, the in game crafting notebook is both really robust and lacking at times. I can track down all the recipes and each step in a recipe by clicking on an item in it or in my inventory super easy! Trying to find a recipe you can't remember can be rough having to look through every page of the book for it.

Making spells out of puke, guarding my sacred life with guano. 10/10. Congrats to mr. fartfish!