I apologize for my comments earlier, but I did get rather frustrated by the very small room with 3 exploding enemies.
Trying again, but on easy mode.
Freezing seems useful against either kind of explosive enemies, if only to stop them - is freeze level 3 with the pistol needed to freeze-stop them? Plasma appears to be effective against the gas exploding enemies.
Still dying some on easy mode, but usually clearing a number of levels before that.
The camera might behave differently when cheesing using alchemy-mix-time-slowdown than when moving around in normal time.
Appears that you need freeze-6 to guarantee freeze-stop enemies.
I found a (software) bug:
It did not end my run, since I could kill it using the scythe.
I decided to clear all rooms on floor 1 even after finding the exit, and succeeded on doing that the second run I found the exit.
Does using the plasma on the blast explosion enemy cause reflection and harming the player? While using it on the gas explosion enemy insta-kills that enemy? I have not yet been able to reliably visually differentiate the two types of exploding enemies, especially in darkness, but I might figure that out eventually. The color of their "eye"? Red for blast explosion enemy, yellow for gas explosion enemy?
On floor 2 now.
I still really like to cheese-snipe all the exploding barrels I can see before starting a level (using fire-3). I do not use the dash, since I am really afraid of dashing into exploding enemies and insta-dying despite this being easy difficulty.
I usually start levels with freeze-3, since that gives a decent chance of freeze-stopping exploding enemies before they annihilate you. I never use the scythe, since I feel the risk of accidentally hitting an exploding barrel and dying or losing lots of health is too high. Maybe I will change opinions if/once I get better at the game. I also start the level by going into time-slow-alchemy-mode, and see where enemies spawn, such as if an exploding enemy spawns right next to you. JUST AFTER I WROTE THIS I STARTED A LEVEL WHERE A GAS EXPLODING ENEMY SPAWNED VERY CLOSE TO ME. And time-slowing saved me. This time around I quickly moved away, switched to plasma, and insta-killed it with the gun.
I died in one room, ran away from one explosion enemy, and another explosion enemy charged me from the other direction.
3rd time I reached the exit, I will skip the other rooms on floor 1 as I think you are meant to just get to the exit.
How do I pause the game during combat?
I think I rather early on found the exit to the 3rd floor. Yes, 3rd floor.
I also sometimes shoot regular barrels simply to give me more space to hopefully be able to circle-strafe and dodge enemies.
acid-3-water-3 reliably one-shots the small laser enemies.
What are the differences between the floors? I do not know if I have found any difference between floor 1, 2 and 3 so far.
Do explosions have longer range than what their visual indicators indicate?
I found the exit on the 3rd floor and that is apparently the end of the demo.
But I only won on the Easy difficulty. I was AFK for a fair bit of the run, so the time spent is likely shorter than what the victory screen indicates.
The game began to be more fun once I learned it, and it does seem interesting. And experimentation and learning fits alchemy very well. Very fast-paced, though the time-slowdown helped with that.