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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.