The Alchemist's Debt

This is more so ranking the promise of the game, rather than the game in it's current form. Right off the bat, the story is great and immersive, the MC is very interesting. The stakes are intriguing, win back your life, or lose your gorgeous wife to slavery. I think the game has it's core elements figured out, just needs technical improvements in a few areas. The inner monologues could be reduced significantly, too many of them, half of which we don't necessarily need to read. The sanbox is not bad at all, but is bugged out currently in specific areas. The character tab is not yet implemented, and the quests tab also shows some bugs, like saying "quest is completed" but it's not actually showing under the "completed quests" tab.

Version .1- I'll rate what's here. There's a large section of story in the beginning with just a black screen.....there should at least be a background here, even if you make it blurry to show he's drunk. Not a lot here for a .1....but the renders when they are present look nice. There are no animations at this time. The story has a good premise, and it has lots of potential. The quest system in nice. Music is fitting. I'll reeval as more updates come out but looks good so far, but since it's just starting it gets an average rating. As more content comes out the rating will probably go up in relation. Good start, keep up the momentum and good work.

Review for 0.1 Pros: The majority of the character CGs in the game look good, at least in isolation (more on that in the cons). The backgrounds are fairly visually consistent and look good at a glance. The music and ambient sounds are fine, although there are no sounds for H-scenes yet. The core gameplay loop is fairly decent, although it isn't anything special. I like that the player isn't punished for talking to NPCs by advancing the time. The navigation could be more intuitive, but I've seen much worse. The characters aren't very fleshed out at this point, but they're mostly fine. The village elder is a caricature, but maybe future updates will humanize him. The build with Sylvia is fine so far, and I'm interested to see where the story with Lotta goes. The voyeurism (not NTR) scene is avoidable, although not signposted. Cons: The writing was at least partially generated with AI, and aside from the regular AI writing issues of weird phrasing and vocabulary, leads to some completely nonsensical plot points. For example, when the MC first wakes up in his new body, it's morning and he's hungover. He gets dragged home and immediately falls asleep, waking up that night. He falls asleep again soon after and wakes up the next day, now a full day later, and is STILL hungover. He goes to see the village elder, has a very short conversation with his wife, and somehow it's already night again! It also results in certain plot points being unnecessarily repeated in the inner monologue, and the writing randomly switching from first person to third person for a portion of the intro. Several scenes feel extremely bloated when very little of importance has happened, and some scenes could be removed entirely or merged with others with zero effect on the story. I noticed some smaller story related inconsistencies like a medieval herbalist seemingly understanding the MC when he describes molecular chemistry, the MC's wife mentioning her husband in conversation to the MC (implying she is married to somebody else), and the village elder saying "You can work for me part time when you can't handle your debt," which strikes me as a rather generous offer considering he previously said he would take your house, your posessions, and your wife as forced labor. There are plenty more, but for the sake of brevity I'll leave it at that. The character CGs do mostly look good, but they suffer from the usual issues of inconsistent clothing, hair, and art style. The characters that are described in the text also don't match their CGs at all, with the village elder being described as "fat" despite him being muscular in his H-scene, and Tressa is described as having graying hair, but her hair is brown in the CGs and she appears to be in her twenties at most. Almost every background has a noticeable drop in quality or change of art style at certain times of day (for example the "evening" and "night" CGs for the main street). The more busy scenes have a significant amount of AI weirdness if looking closely, like the gun on the desk in the seamstress' house and the nonsensical architecture of the village elder's second floor, but I don't consider this a big issue. The scene with the seamstress comes out of absolutely nowhere - she has basically zero characterization so far, and unlike with Sylvia's path where the MC is seen to be becoming attracted to her, the only interaction we had with her prior is helping her with a random task. The MC's name is Wanko, and you are unable to rename him. The CGs for the carpenter are missing and attempting to interact will cause an instant crash. I usually wouldn't consider this a big issue for a 0.1 release, but I feel that this is indicative of the level of QC in this project so far. Overall: It's clear that some effort has gone into implementing the core systems and the art is decent for an AI game - in places it's just conventionally good. Unfortunately with how reading-heavy this game is, there's just no way I can give a decent rating with the writing being as bad as it is. I think the core ideas and systems are solid, but if future content for this game is at the same level of quality then I have to say it isn't worth your time.

A new game to watch. It could turn out to be fun, could be a grinding AI mess leading nowhere. Time will tell, but it is a fun start and premise. Right now it is a fairly basic quest fulfillment game. Keep it up, flesh it out add some story and twists and maybe you can get yourself something interesting.