You are facing: a skeleton.
Around you: a healing potion and a lot of gold coins.
You have no weapons. No means to defend yourself. You considered throwing the potion at the skeleton, but you know it wouldn’t be enough. Just as you’re about give up and accept your fate though, an idea forms in your head. With quick hands, you push the red vial into the pile of coins. In front of your eyes it begins to transform, fusing together with the liquid to form your salvation.
You now have: a bomb! Behold the power of alchemy!
The Rogue Alchemist
Developed and published by 717pixels (also known as Ivan Khokhlenkov and Pixelzwaard on various store pages), Alchemy Dungeon is a pixel-graphics puzzle roguelike. Combine and merge various items to discover new recipes. Use your powers and the weapons you create to weaken and defeat enemies. Become even more formidable through the power of gold coins, all in a pleasant pixelated presentation.
All That Glitters
Alchemy Dungeon sports retro pixel-style graphics, aiming for simplicity and readability. Small yellow circle? That’s a coin. Red liquid in vial? A healing potion. Big and blocky with a mean grimace? Probably an enemy of some kind. Sometimes foes can be “upgraded” to look more and more complex, at which point it can become hard to tell what exactly they are. Their gameplay doesn’t change though, so it’s only a visual issue. Anything that matters is relatively easy to recognize. Even if not, you can always press on the tile in question to get a helpful hint box about it.
The soundtrack is pleasant and relaxing, perfect for a thinking-game like this. However, it clearly wasn’t written for lengthy play sessions, as there are only two tracks. One for the main menu, and one for gameplay. This means you will be listening to the same one track for most of your time playing. While it is a nice song, hope you like it enough to listen to it on repeat.
Skeleton Plus Sword Equals…
Before you select the stage you want to visit, Alchemy Dungeon lets you pick a character and up to three special powers to take with you. Each character has their own passive effect as well as a unique item they can create by combining two gold coins. Meanwhile, the special powers can aid in defeating enemies or shaking up a stale board state. While there are some characters and powers that are objectively better than others, the game has enough variety to allow for some creative builds.
Once you’re ready, you can select a dungeon. To begin with, only the first one is available, but you unlock more of the game as you play. Each dungeon takes place on a five by five grid—tap a light gray tile to discover it and reveal either an enemy, a weapon, or a helpful object. Items on neighboring tiles can be dragged onto each other to create a combination, this is where the alchemy comes in! Each dungeon has different enemies and combinations available, but at first you know none of them. As you discover them, your list of recipes fills up, allowing more educated decision-making. Two of the most important things you can do include using weapons on enemies, and combining items with enemies. The latter upgrades the enemy, but don’t worry! This actually weakens them, causing them to lose one health point.
Equivalent Exchange
Beyond alchemy, you can also just tap on an item to pick it up, or an enemy to attack it barehanded, though the latter makes you lose health. An attempt ends when your health reaches zero, and if you are too careless about item usage and combinations, you might end up with a board of enemies and not have much of a choice. Try to rely on already discovered objects rather than new tiles— they might all end up monsters, and you can quickly find yourself in a tricky situation.
When a run ends, you keep all the gold you gathered. This currency is used to strengthen your characters and powers, but is also a benchmark for unlocking new ones, as you need to earn a certain amount in various dungeons in order to progress. The benchmarks aren’t too strict, but you will probably still need a couple tries to reach them.
Being a free mobile game, Alchemy Dungeon does have some microtransactions. First, you can buy gold in order to speed up advancement, if you just want to set the game up to be a frequent five-minute time-waster and don’t care about the progression itself. Second, you can spend a little money to disable all ads. This latter option was a bit odd to me, as through my entire time playing, I haven’t actually encountered a single advertisement in the first place (save for the developer’s own unintrusive suggestions of their other games).
Alchemy Dungeon is one of those games you play when you have five minutes and don’t really have anything else to fill the time with. The title is well designed for keeping you engaged for short periods of time. The graphics are enjoyable, the music is pleasant, and the gameplay is just puzzling enough to keep your attention. If you enjoy progression and unlocking new options though, you might run out of things to acquire after just a few hours of playtime. Still, being a free game, it’s not like you’re losing anything, and whatever time you spend on it will at least be a fun distraction. Might as well give alchemy a try, hmm?
