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. But then on my third fight it was raining. The rain and thunder were SUPER loud and none of the sound settings would lower or mute it. I had to stop playing. Until that gets fixed, I can't really recommend it.

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…