Reseñas

• gamedeal user

  Jan 14, 2018

  Small but well made Metroidvania. Very satisfying exploring and getting those upgrades after you've spotted so many places to use them. I also enjoyed several puzzle rooms, that require a bit of thought and planning to solve. Requires patience as you are free to explore the map on your own, and sometimes savepoints are spaced out a bit far.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 3, 2017

  Alchemist's Castle is an exploratory platformer that tries to channel Metroidvania titles, and at least for its price does a decent job doing so. The artwork is quite decent, which is why I picked it up. Upon playing it, I found several flaws (as documented below), but the developers are open to criticism and have made changes based on the issues I encountered with the game. While there's still a few flaws within the game, such as the nondescript rooms mentioned below, I think that if you like exploration platformers, it's worth picking up for its price of a buck. ----------------- Original review here for archival purposes: Alchemist's Castle is an exploratory platformer that tries to channel Metroidvania titles but kind of fails doing so. While I understand that this is a very low budget title, I would not recommend playing it, as there are some fatal flaws that make the game fairly uninteresting. Given its price, the art is surprisingly decent (and was the main reason I picked this up), but beyond that it kind of falls apart. I'll start with the map: It's pretty hard to decipher, doesn't have a "you are here" marker - at least as far as I could tell. Moving along, the font used makes reading the plot scrolls unbearable, at least to me. There is no indicator that you took damage. Occasionally I think I took fall damage but I'm not sure if that is true or if I grazed an enemy/trap. There is no way to tell. The progression and level design are... lackluster. These two tie together because whenever I got a powerup, I still didn't know where to go, since the rooms all are so nondescript, and the maze-like construction of the world makes it very hard to remember which path to take for areas where you may have been stuck in before - the map of course doesn't help. For now, I would recommend you to skip this game, though if some of the issues are cleared up, it definitely has potential as a low budget title.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 28, 2019

  A fun, little metroidvania game with lots of reading. Played in Dynamic mode using a keyboard. Good points - The game is quick. I beat it in around 2 hours, then went for 100% completion in not much more than that. - The map is easy to follow and made traversing its various pathways fun. - The story and its many parts engaged me. - The puzzles and gameplay were fun with a moderate to hard difficulty. Bad points - The graphics were on the low end and there wasn't much variety in the monsters. But for how small the game is, that's not that big a deal. - There were random typos in the journals. Like the graphics, it's not that big a deal; they don't make reading the journals hard or drag down the story any. - I came across a few bugs during the game and it halfway crashed me to the desktop midway through, but I was able to get back into the game to continue. - The controls really need a rehaul. I tried using a controller originally and got screwed when it came to the bomb, where none of the buttons threw said bomb. Getting to the menu to remap the controller ended up sort of freezing the game and leaving me stranded with no way to alter the buttons and no way to back out of the menu. Another issue was the game says 'press bomb symbol to throw bomb' instead of 'Press A' or 'Press ctrl', for every feature. And a third, when I switched to keyboard, was the keyboard layout is also lame. Space is jump, arrows (or a and d) were move, ctrl is bomb, shift is run, enter is 'ok/next'. Sounds good on paper, but using hands makes this difficult. I had to keep switching between bombs and running with my pinky finger, or a combo of my ring and pinky, and that's difficult to do when you're surrounded by ghosts and bats. This would have been easier if the controls on the left hand were on the asdf/space pallet for everything but moving. Over all, if you liked playing games like Metroid and Momodora, you'd probably have a nice afternoon of free time playing Alchemist's Castle. Just so long as you remap the controls ahead of time (if you can). I gave this game a positive review because outside of the controls and bugs I enjoyed playing it, and the rooms were intuitive. I was also able to beat the game. However if I could have given the game a 'meh' or middle-ground rating, I would.