Lonely Witch Alchemy

This is a really fun game! Made me feel wistful? In a way?

Really should go eat! Totally didn't notice that I didn't try out water with everything until about 2 minutes in! heh.

Well, cool game! Ditto on the "expected more" journal entries front. At least now I know I don't have to keep checking back just in case, since there's only 2?

Scroll wheel only working on top to go to leftmost is unexpected. Thought it would either do nothing or go left and right.

Anything below this is likely spoilers.

Nevermind, figured out the pot.

Got stuck on Hourglass. Not sure Journal Entries unlock is consistent, so that got slightly confusing.

I got as far as I could without knowing that I needed a planter/gardening-pot,
(One already has dirt and can grow trees, that such a gardening container never came to mind.) Or which to summon an animal, you need to prepare an appropriate environment.

It's way too easy to get caught up trying to exhaust new creations than taking things methodically. The fact that the seeds were 'mixed' was a good clue that they contained different things that activated in different ways.

I don't mind abstract symbolism. However the final few combinations relied on guessing what the developer had in mind; than adhering to a learned consistency. The animal puzzles required more patience than applying the game's logic. By the end of the game, my thoughts lingered on combinations never realised. Which becomes a great source of inspiration for others to draw from.

All in all, a really neat game! :)

It's actually pretty interesting and fun. I enjoyed the addition of a storyline. It is on the short side, I think I maybe completed it in like 1.5 hours? Maybe longer. Consider that I didn't use the cheat sheet for this. Only real thing is that I felt that the ending was a bit lacking? Could've been more than just one single journal entry. Another thing is, this is pretty prominent in most alchemy games I guess, is that after a while, you're pretty much stumped. I wanted to not use the cheat sheet but I just ended up brute forcing everything.

SPOILERS BELOW

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I stumbled through r/internetisbeautiful to a coffee site to this game. The journal, sound effects, and icons are charming and welcoming, the old-school Alchemy gameplay is relaxing, and the aesthetic is pleasing, but...

... the gameplay is way too hard. After getting the axe, ore, and fire, I had no idea what to do next other than to combine randomly. I resorted to the cheat sheet which told me I had to create mud, and mix the mud with water to create clay (?) which is a bizarre solution I never would have guessed. And these bizarre solutions keep coming! I so often felt like I had to guess what combination to do next and nothing was working that I had more fun looking at the cheat sheet and following it instead of trying things out myself. Which is a shame, because there are nice puzzles like the eye of newt and leg of ant one in the journal-- I just in a million years would not have figured out the prerequisites to those puzzles myself. Some of the worst recipes were honey=bee+behive (not bee+flower, not bee+bee, not bee+syrup...), jar of herbs (the salt comes in a glass jar on its own, the hourglass just needs glass with sand, why doesn't herbs+glass work), wood pulp (I just never would have got this one). I think it could work if there were more journal hints and lore about what to do next, like something about the mixed seeds sprouting in different conditions, or a little bit about how paper is made so as to hint you need to do it with an axe, though of course that leads to the requirement of needing a lot more writing.

As a side note, I think this uses HTML drag and drop, which, while a decent solution for combining things, is extremely unappealing to look at with the plus sign and the semitransparent dragging. I guess it's a lot to ask for a custom built version but it would be nice to have something to fit the very cute atmosphere the rest of the game builds.

This cheatsheet is a true godsend