Alchemy of the Earth

My first honest reaction to Alchemy of the Earth was curiosity mixed with cautious skepticism. One developer, a first game, an open-world first-person survival RPG built in Unreal Engine 5, and an absurdly literal design goal: over 200 million interactable plants crammed into the foliage system. That is either the work of someone who genuinely does not know the word 'scope' or someone swinging hard enough that you have to respect it. After spending time with it, I think it is a bit of both, and that tension is exactly what makes this game worth examining closely before you commit. The core loop is more system-heavy than the dreamlike marketing framing suggests. You traverse a hand-crafted island map across 6 distinct biomes, picking up plant ingredients, grinding them down, and distilling them into potions, poultices, and throwable potion bombs. The crafting layer runs on an aspects-and-essences logic, meaning ingredient combinations produce meaningfully different outputs: combat spells, healing draughts, buffs. The enemies you are using those outputs against are the Varharti, the island's undead original inhabitants. Combat is first-person and spell-slinging, and the community has flagged aim inconsistency with projectile spells as a persistent annoyance. The developer has been responsive, shipping patches that, among other fixes, bumped overall game speed by 40 percent after players found pacing too sluggish at launch. That kind of active iteration matters on a game with a review count this small. The narrative structure is what separates this from a generic survival sandbox. Fabian, the alchemist whose dreamscape you are walking through, delivers his story via over 50 voiced audio narrations spread across more than 50 distinct locations. The writing pulls together grief, historical alternate-history threads rooted in the 1798 Siege of Cairo, and the invention of a dream-stabilizing drug called Moly tea. It is a novella-length story designed to unfold through exploration, not cutscene dumps. Players who are patient and genuinely curious will get considerably more out of this than anyone rushing through combat looking for a power fantasy. The 80-minute original soundtrack reinforces the isolating, melancholy atmosphere the writing establishes. Where the game earns its mixed reception is in rough-edge territory familiar to any solo-dev debut. Performance in dense foliage zones can be unstable, the UI is functional rather than polished, and some item icons use generative AI (the developer is transparent about this, clarifying that no 3D assets, music, writing, or environment design involved AI). Spell aim reliability, as noted by players, still needs work even post-patch. These are real friction points, not nitpicks. If your tolerance for early-access-adjacent roughness is low, that should factor into your decision. If you have ever deliberately sought out a strange, personal, slightly broken piece of solo developer ambition and found more reward in it than in a sanitized AAA release, the formula here is familiar and the asking price reflects it.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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