The Hollow Alchemist

I started playing it and I thought it felt pretty good at the beginning. It was pretty interesting to have you be free roaming at the camp for you to talk to your companion and just wander around and look at a reference book. There was also no starting tutorial which felt a bit weird since there were mechanics such as using your companion during the fight which wasn't explained. Edit: There used to be really loud rain and thunder effects but that has been fixed as noted in the reply from the dev. I checked, it's not nearly so bad now. I also reached the first town which was interesting as it let you wander about freely just like the camp. For now I can recommend it, but as an early access game it still needs some polish.

Full disclosure, one of the developers asked for feedback in a server I'm in. Finished the available content and was happy with it. The deck-building works well, as most of the cards I got felt effective. There's a lot of options to customise your deck in each camp and town as well, and passive bonuses you can get that can augment your strategy. The alchemy system is interesting but in the demo I didn't find a lot of reason to engage with it; often there are so many buffs and debuffs floating around that it's best to focus on barrier (which prevents damage entirely) and fortify (armour persists through each turn), and then burn through with pure damage. The balance was fine, I'm not particularly good at these types of games but I managed to muddle through to the end of what's there with a decently lucky build. There are free-roaming sections and I was surprised that there were some mechanics tied to this, like vaulting ledges and pushing blocks. It played well but then these mechanics are used nowhere else so far that I could find. I had some performance issues but my PC is very old at this point. Most of the animations are fine although the face animations need a little work. Th…