Given the state of everything, I felt the urge for a cozy game, one that creates a fantasy world full of adorable creatures and good feels, so I opted to try The Last Alchemist. While The Last Alchemist definitely offers beautiful visuals and a tranquil alchemical experience, it’s just a touch short in duration to have much replayability. However, your mileage on this point may vary.
Plot Ahoy!
You play the eponymous last alchemist, though you begin the title as an apprentice and the sole survivor of a plague that wiped out your village. You did not escape unharmed, however, and despite your growing skills in alchemy, you were unable to find a cure, only a way to slow the plague’s progression. As a result, the game opens with you being willing to give alchemy one more try, which you don’t really have much choice about given how weakened the plague has rendered you. Prior to the title’s beginning, you returned to your old, deceased master’s observatory, desperate to find a cure.
While there, you encounter the Agari, who once befriended your master. It’s now up to you to gain their trust as the last alchemist as you rush to save your own life and preserve your master’s legacy.
Review Notes
Okay, I’ll be the first to admit, the Agari are adorable. They are little mushroom creatures, many bearing the names of fungi familiar from the real world, and they’re mostly your interlocutors throughout the title. The rest of the visuals are straight out of a storybook, giving you that tranquil vibe that so many of the games existing within the cozy genre strive to create. The general aesthetic leans hard into cottagecore as well, which only adds to The Last Alchemist’s ambience.
As the name implies, gameplay mostly involves creating essences and the machinery required to distill your alchemical concoctions, and The Last Alchemist does this usually via puzzle games. The same engine drives a number of these games, so be aware that you’ll need to be able to place items where they need to go in order to solve puzzles. While none of the puzzles are necessarily too simple, some of them can be more difficult, especially if your spatial reasoning is on the weaker side. Fortunately, none of the puzzles stray into frustratingly difficult territory, so the difficulty never outstrips the reward.
One of my favorite aspects of the title is that the primary currency is insight, which is just really good as an idea. It encourages and rewards experimentation and exploration, and it values knowledge. The Last Alchemist offers an encyclopedia to keep track of all of your discoveries, so you needn’t be concerned that you’ll have to remember everything you learn. It’s just another way in which the title encourages you to value knowledge and understanding, and frankly, we should probably all learn to value those a bit more than we do.
The other big stat to monitor in The Last Alchemist is stamina. Remember, you’re playing an alchemist afflicted with a deadly disease, and that plague is ravaging your body. Therefore, you’ll need to take plenty of breaks to rest in order to replenish your stamina. Honestly, this choice on behalf of the game developers strikes a great balance between maintaining story immersion while not forcing players to have to halt in order to take a long rest. Any long-time sim or Dungeons and Dragons player can tell you how frustrating it can be to interrupt gameplay that way. I’m not certain the devs meant for the title to be an exploration of what it’s like to live with a chronic illness, but the gameplay certainly invites players to reflect more than a bit on what that must be like.
The stamina mechanic also informs how far you can go to harvest the plants and herbs you’ll need to distill in order to create your essences. Unsurprisingly, collecting the raw ingredients is a big, big part of gameplay, but you will need to be judicious about how you use your resources because though plants and herbs are abundant, you can only harvest a site once every seven days. Yes, you read that right. This wait time both guarantees that you won’t be burning through resources with abandon and extends the gameplay because it does serve as a slight punishment for making an error. If you do run afoul of this mechanic, you can take some time to build furniture and otherwise customize your workspace, revealing the game’s bones as a sim, albeit one with a more well-developed fantasy component.
As a player, you can chart your progression by how easily you circumvent obstacles. The Last Alchemist naturally blocks access to certain resources by using rocks or other impediments for which you’ll need a specific essence to break down. If you haven’t discovered that essence, however, there’s not much you can do to progress. If the game has a weakness, it lies in this particular element of the design. These blocks artificially extend the length of the title. Yes, all obstacles tend to do that, but in The Last Alchemist it feels particularly purposeful especially given how much time needs to be spent grinding just the right essence. The answer to that is that it can be so much you forget exactly what you were doing in the first place.
TLDR
Overall, The Last Alchemist is an engaging cozy sim that invites you to give some thought to recognizing your own limits and pushing them responsibly. The story is fairly straightforward, involving a redemption arc and forcing you to make connections along the way, but straightforward isn’t necessarily bad. Not every gaming experience needs to involve complex story themes, and The Last Alchemist provides engaging puzzles with comfortable gameplay while also asking that you think about your own fragility a bit.
The Last Alchemist retails on Steam for $19.99.
Stray Thoughts From Behind the Keyboard
- There is no controller support, by the way, so you’re stuck using The Last Alchemist’s set controls.
- I’m not going to call the alchemist’s disease an invisible disease because he does actually walk around on a prosthetic.
- The drag and drop system can be a bit touchy. It’s not so bad as to mar gameplay, but it can be frustrating.