While I would say that the game was near perfectly balanced, I wouldn't say that it was fun. The game itself is alright, but so many minor annoyances add up to just making this an unfun experience. Moving things works like one half of the time, expansions really are not explained well, in the game or the text beneath it, and having to hold click to look at the recipes is just absolutely horrid. It failed often and when I was looking through all my buildings to find out what to do next it would take forever because of having to hold it. The game isn't that unique either, just a crafting game with a worker limit. The ones I have played weren't this awful point and click so you got that going for it. Also, the theme is hardly, if at all. What's done isn't really alchemy, but rather just crafting

Pretty fun game!  One thing that was kind of confusing was the arrows at the top, right, and bottom of actions that had finished upgrading.

Great, but I have to constantly check where to get stuff later in the game and the actions to get the info are a pain. It would be great to be able to pining the recipes, and setup ways to automate earlier recipes.

The idea and format is really interesting though. It just needs more polish and user testing.

This is all from the perspective of a full fledged game though. It's great given the restrictions of the game jam.

The dragging things into the slots of other things with timers and stuff reminds me a lot of Cultist Simulator. Much like Cultist Simulator, discoverability was really rough past the first few dozen minues, but if a game like this became popular I'm sure people would build a detailed Wiki for to share discovered recipes.

As far as things to fix, I'd say making the stack splitting render the hovering copy with the number of items so that you can see what you're doing would be nice, at the moment you can't really tell how many items you're holding but the issue was largely reduced by often not caring how many items I was holding...

Uniqueness and fun really wins it for me- It has a really nice item system and fun recipes. It was fun figuring out how to handle the supply chains in a way that would minimise waiting. But as with all jam games, I'd like some more QoL- A more clear indicator that you're dragging a machine would be nice, and an easier way to see recipes would be too. This game has the reverse-alterhistorian problem- You can only zoom but not move, which makes it a bit clunky. It was slow to see the recipes via holding down left click too.

Balance could do with some work- It was quite tedious in a few of the places especially after discovering the two new locations, which was not helped by the obtuse controls and claustrophobic interface (Which I wouldn't blame too much, given my game has the same issues)

Theme wasn't really used that much until the end, where you start brewing essences.

All in all this game is one of the better ones in a jam where I felt like the entries were already pretty good already. I was actually excited to see what expansions would give and what question marks would do. Nice job.

I gave it a pretty good rating because I enjoyed it, but I wanted to note that the controls leave much to be desired here. Holding down left click is a slow control (by definition), is not intuitive (so players better have read the controls!), and in general just kinda clunky. I wonder if the two hold actions could’ve just been triggered on hover instead.

Pretty fun overall, the controls and QoL stuff could be better, but still enjoyable

I do see this as something along the lines of "Cultist Simulator", but the lack of quality of life features really bring this game down.  The playspace becomes cluttered fast and it's not clear what you have to do starting form the very first part and getting more and more confusing as it goes on.

I'm pretty sure there is a game somewhere in the confusion. I will not be looking for it.

It took me a while to figure out how the game worked. But once I did it was a lot of fun. Would love to see a longer version of this game.