Game Review: Alchemic Cutie

By Manuel

Players: 1
Platforms: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, XBox, Nintendo Switch, PC

Have a farming itch that the usual round of Story of Seasons, Stardew Valley, or Harvest Moon can't quite scratch? Well, perhaps Alchemic Cutie is for you. Previously released for the XBox and PC, it's now arrived on the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and the Nintendo Switch. Despite what I just said though, it's not quite the same type of game that it arguably resembles the most. With that in mind, it is a farm-based simulation though, so let's try to pinpoint what kind of game Alchemic Cutie is, if it's something you're going to want to dive into, and if it is even able to run on the new consoles it's coming to... Read on and get ready to harvest Jelly poop!

Alchemic Cutie puts you into the shoes of Yvette, a newly graduated alchemist who has returned to her family's farm on Wimba Island. This whimsical island is inhabited by several villagers who operate the island's main town area, which consists of about a dozen buildings. Also, the family farm isn't the kind that grows crops; it's one that catches, herds, and harvests Jellies. Your goal is to use your flute, which is the source of your alchemic powers in this game, to grow your family's farm, help out the villagers, and maybe make some money too. Along the way you can learn more about the other villagers, complete the random tasks they give you, and open up more areas of the island by turning your lovely Jellies into Relics that you drop off at the island's many mysterious shrines. Wimba Island isn't the largest world that farming simulations has to offer, but there is a lot for a player to experience... if they're able to figure out exactly how things work in this world that is...

You're a big nerd too.

Wimba Island is quite cute though.

Now that last part wasn't just a random aside, you're given a few basic tutorials by your father on how to catch a Jelly, how to breed Jellies so they lay an egg, and how to turn a Jelly into the Relics that you use on the aforementioned Shrines. Besides those gameplay elements, which besides catching Jellies aren't exactly the most important to know, nothing else in the game is explained to you. There are no other in-game tutorials, even in the menus, and those intro ones I previously mentioned aren't able to be revisited after you've gone through them. You're literally tossed into a needlessly complex game and just left to your own devices. If this game were more popular I may have been able to look online for a community guide or something, but there is little to no information about the game, not even on the game's official website. I can't stress enough that nothing is explained to you, and you're basically expected to trial and error your way through the game's many confusing mechanics. Don't know what you're supposed to do to raise a Jelly's stats? Good luck with that! Don't know how you're supposed to find and gather all the items you're required to by the end of the month? Well, sucks to be you! All this is made even more confusing by the game's art style and dialogue, which both skew towards a very young audience. Alchemic Cutie feels like a game meant for children most of the time, but it plays in a way that I can't see even the most patient of kids giving this the time of day. You can get some vague clues from the other villagers here and there, but it feels about as helpful as NPC dialogue from old-school NES games. It may seem like I'm going on about this a lot, but half of the time I spent on this game was simply trying to figure out how it works; and I still never properly worked out most of it.

Seriously, what is this shop screen?

A bridge created by delivering Relics to a Shrine.

There isn't really a story here beyond what I already mentioned so hopefully that's not what you're here for. You can learn more about the villagers themselves via dialogue trees, but there isn’t really any sort of reward for doing this. Also, you're only able to go through a few dialogue options with each of them a day before they refuse to answer any other questions. Some may find the villagers interesting, cute, or endearing, but I didn't feel that way for any of them, especially when they started rudely refusing to talk to me after two or three questions. They may not want to give you their life story, but they DO want to give you random fetch quests to complete. Some of these feel more important and random than others, and I'm not sure if they're all the same on each playthrough. These are barely anything special though and usually involve delivering items to another villager, gathering a specific resource for a specific villager, or something even more pointless like retrieving overdue library books. There is a certain amount of progression in the form of Shrines which offer new areas to explore, and shortcuts to help get around the island more quickly. I didn't manage to deliver Relics to all of these in my playthrough though, but I did complete enough of them to come to the conclusion that they didn't really offer much besides paths to more Shrines/Jellies, or areas with different/new materials. There are different seasons to experience, and rain that totally kills the game's framerate, but I was not able to see much of these for this review.

Comics are books.

Just what I always wanted to be: A Potty Polisher

You might be wondering why I haven't mentioned the "alchemy" in Alchemic Cutie much yet... well, there's a few reasons for that. First of all, we need to talk a bit about energy, alchemy, gathering, and Jellies. Much of the game is spent hunting down Jellies and having them join your farm. You do this by using your flute which takes up energy. You can recover this energy by sleeping, reading a book, or eating, but I never once had to do this. After you get a Jelly, you then feed them various foods that you can get from gathering random items scattered throughout the island, like flowers and trash, or you can buy them specific treats from the General Store. As they eat more they gain levels and can be trained by various villagers. (Who apparently alter stats in a way unique to them.) From there they can turned into Relics, entered into various competitions, used to complete certain delivery quests, simply kept on the farm so you can harvest their poop, or even left on the farm so you can see them randomly blow up in the morning. I'm not kidding about the latter part either. Every morning in my playthrough started with several Jellies blowing up and leaving behind random loot. Thanks to the lack of tutorials I never really figured out why this was happening. The competitions you enter them in feel like they're straight out of an old Tamagotchi as your actual input in how a Jelly performs is generally minimal and seems to rely solely on stats and RNG. As far as food goes, you can feed the Jellies pretty much anything, with some items being better than others. Besides charming Jellies you use your alchemic flute to regrow plants that you've picked, and even sometimes transform items into better versions. Now if your Jellies don't blow up on their own, or are blown up by you to become Relics, you can also keep feeding them until they poop out various "beans". These beans are used to complete quests, sell for money, and can even be fed back to the Jellies. It may sound like I'm glancing over the gameplay a bit, and I probably am, but there's a lot of this game I was never able to experience because of a lack of tutorials and... something else I'm going to cover in depth later in this review.

The Jellies can swim too.

Jelly Madonna would totally win this.

Visually speaking, Alchemic Cutie looks a LOT like Stardew Valley at first. As you've may have noticed by my descriptions of the gameplay, it is nothing at all like that game, but it has to be mentioned. It has that same simplistic overhead 2D sprite art style, and even has a comparable color palette and similar-looking menu and dialogue screens. One odd thing though is just how far back the camera is pulled back in Alchemic Cutie. Everything just looks so tiny, and this transfers over into the menus as well. I found it really hard to find the exact items I wanted in shops or inventory since their representative images are just a few pixels big in a wide open sea of available screen real estate. If the developers made everything just a bit bigger it would've gone a long way in making this confusing experience a bit more palatable. Elsewhere the art style is a bit lacking. Every other villager on Wimba Island besides Yvette's family is an animal, but these are a far cry from the loveable animal friends from games like Animal Crossing. This may be a personal taste thing, but I felt that most of the characters were downright ugly. There seem to be a lot of frogs, or frog-like creatures, on the Wimba Island and there wasn't a single one that I didn't cringe at inwardly whenever I had to interact with them. Also, like I mentioned before, you don't ever really get to know them all that much, so it didn't help out me wanting to ignore them as much as possible. Possibly ugly villagers aside though, the Jellies themselves are pretty cute. Besides looking like a ball of squishy slime, you're also able to customize their appearance with accessories like sunglasses and hats. If only I could glam up the villagers in a similar way though...

Music isn't something that stands out in Alchemic Cutie, and I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing. Most of the music is simply there, it doesn't add or detract from the experience in any meaningful way. While it's not really fair to keep comparing this to more traditional farming games, it can be said that music in the genre doesn't often go beyond simply existing and staying out of the way of the gameplay experience. In that sense the music succeeds. There wasn't any one track that made me want to listen to it outside of the game, and there also weren't any that made me turn down the volume. Now the same can't be said for the character's "voices". The game has two voice modes, "villager" and "RPG". The former, "villager", is akin to what you'd hear in Animal Crossing, though not as finessed, and "RPG" is a simple typing sound accompanying dialogue. "Villager" is on by default and it was such a poor imitation of the AC sound that I immediately changed to RPG so I could avoid it for the rest of my playhthrough. The problem is that Alchemic Cutie is the only modern game I've ever played that doesn't save your preferred options. Every time I started up the game again I'd have to go into the options menu and hit "RPG" or I'd be subjected to the Great Value brand version of Animalese that definitely haunts me in my sleep. This isn't a total deal-breaker, but it was honestly pretty annoying and could've been one less for me to have to complain about.

There's a lot of poop in Alchemic Cutie.

I'd rather play War of The Mages.

You'd think there wouldn't be a lot to talk about when it comes to controls, but there actually are a few key points I want to cover here. Most controls, like movement and picking up items, are pretty straightforward and work correctly. Using your flute though, for the "alchemy" of course, is a bit odd as it's hard to focus in on any one thing you want to use it on. Want to target a Jelly in a field of grass? Better be ready to clear the entire area first by accident. Want to select exactly one Jelly among the dozens on your farm? Well, hope you're happy hitting every single one BUT the one you wanted to. Speaking of interacting with Jellies, once again arguably the most important factor of the game, the game has something of a collision detection issue. I don't think I ever accurately fed, petted, or picked up any Jelly the way I intended to; every action took two or three attempts to properly pull off. You can actually keep pressing the "feed" option over and over again, and see your items decrease, without ever actually feeding the Jelly you wanted to. There's barely even a sound to indicate if you succeed at any of these actions either, and even less of an animation for it, so good luck figuring out if you did it or not. Also, choosing options in conversations (another important factor in gameplay) is very slow, and there are far too many parts of all conversations where you're simply not allowed to end them until you click through a few windows and find the "Good Bye" option. Why you have to HOLD the B button down to leave the few conversations you are allowed to quit out of instead of simply hitting B once, is something I still can't understand. Also, there are no "Buy" or "Sell" options in the shops. You have to hit the Y button to switch between you or the shopkeeper, something I didn't figure out until hours of playing. There are certain control options that really made me wonder if the developers have ever played any other video game before as I can't understand how some of these wonky control choices could've been made otherwise.

You do get to pet the Jellies though.

This is right before a bunch of Jellies exploded.

Now, I have to talk about something that may be specific only to my experience to playing the game, but it's something that weighs heavily on the review. Simply put, this game does not run on the Nintendo Switch, which was the console I reviewed it on. At the time of writing Alchemic Cutie still has yet to be released so there's a chance that a Day One patch may fix the issues I'm about to lay out, so I'm going to attempt to keep these issues only here. Upon booting up the game made an attempt to move to the town area and noticed that the game was having a tough time scrolling with me, and would briefly freeze every now and then. I thought that this was just a random occurrence, but it happened every time I played from then on at random moments. Many other glitches happened too, especially whenever I visited my Jelly Farm. The game would slow to nearly a crawl if there were several of them jumping around at once, and if it was raining I'd often see frames go into the single digits. This might not be so bad if these two actions, walking around and interacting with your Jellies, weren't the main things you'll be doing in any and all playthroughs. I tried to play in docked vs. handheld, and even installed it onto the console itself as opposed to the SD card, but the problems persisted. Unfortunately this wasn't the only issue. The game straight up FROZE several times, not crashed, but froze. I played Pokémon Violet on launch and experienced a game crashing to the Home Menu for the first time there, but Alchemic Cutie not only hit this critical stage far more frequently, but it did it in a more annoying way: it completely froze up, with the sound even hanging on the last note played, and had to be manually shut down and restarted.

I played for maybe 6-8 hours and this happened a total of five times, with no indication as to what might be causing it. Now, I wanted to play the game a lot longer for the sake of providing a fair review, and to honestly figure out more of the game, but the last of those five freezes happened when the game was loading and it corrupted my save. At that point I figured that the gameplay part of my review was done and that I cannot in good faith say that this game actually RUNS on the Nintendo Switch at all. Perhaps I'll edit this part of the review if it turns out a game-fixing patch is launched, but I did a bit of research after the save corruption issue and I've seen the few reviews of this game mention several game breaking bugs existing way back in its original 2021 Steam launch, so I'm not exactly holding my breath that any fixes are coming. With all this said, I hope you now realize why other parts of the review felt like they were lacking a bit when it came to coverage.

[Update: A patch has been released and it may have fixed the freezing issues. I restarted the game to test it and while it did still have most of the other issues I outlined above, it didn't freeze or crash in the time I played it.]

666 Items Sold.

Clearly this game doesn't take place in the US.

This is usually the part where I talk about replayability and value, but I can't really cover that as I don't see myself attempting to play this game again anytime soon. With that said, I'd imagine that if you find the gameplay loop entertaining that there's definitely a lot to potentially see here, and games like this allow for one to go for min/max runs on subsequent playthroughs. I don't see many people actually doing that if the many bugs are just left to wreak havoc, but it's not the type of game that you're meant to play, beat, and put away forever. The lack of any direction in the game, the bad controls and possibly ugly art direction, and its very unstable nature in general make me feel that most people will probably spend even less time with the game than I did. Also, the game is launching with a price of $19.99, and taking everything into account, I'd say that money could be better used buying one of the other games mentioned at the top of the review; most especially Stardew Valley.

Even though I spent a chunk of the review outlying why you shouldn't pick this game up at all if you're playing on the Switch, I also can't recommend picking up this game at all. Alchemic Cutie passed the time well when it was working, but it was never quite FUN. The biggest issue is the lack of in-game tutorials or explanations of what is expected of you, and I don't see things like that being fixed with a patch or two. After hearing about how long the Steam release remained broken I can't help but guess that the PlayStation releases are somehow as broken as the Switch version, at least I'm going to wait until more reviews roll in and see if they are, and I suggest everyone does so as well. At its core Alchemic Cutie isn't a good game, but there is a hint of what this game COULD have been if different choices were made in terms of presentation and stability. Hopefully the developers do better on their next title, and maybe I'll review an Alchemic Cutie sequel at some point in the future as I really wanted to like this game.

For More Information on Alchemic Cutie:
https://alchemiccutie.com/

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Story: C-
Gameplay: D
Graphics: C-
Music/Sound: C
Value: C-

Overall: C-

Pros:
+ A chill, laid-back style game that has a steady gameplay loop.
+ There's some funny interactions between the characters at times.
+ For a title so small there's a surprising amount of content and complexity.

Cons:
- The lack of in-game tutorials for most of the game mechanics make the experience a chore to play at times.
- There isn't much of a progressive story and much of the game's depth is hidden behind a required amount of trial and error.
- Some might find Alchemic Cutie a charming, fulfilling experience, but it doesn't really compare well to the titles it seems to be inspired by.
- There's a general feeling of confusion if this is meant to be a game for children or a one for more experienced players.
- Simple things, like the options not being saved between playthroughs, make the overall presentation feel lacking.
- This game, as currently released, runs pretty terribly on the Nintendo Switch.

A copy of this game was provided to us free-of-charge by the publisher for the purpose of this review. This did not affect our review in any way.

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Cheese it! The Feds!