Lizstar

Gay Murr Girl

Liz, Goblin, Part-Time Shark, VTuber, retired speedrunner, author, GDQ staff, Sega fan, "Yuri Sommelier", Walking Encyclopedia of All Things Useless, Twitch partner, general menace. Says "Murr" a lot. This is not a place of honor, views my own, etc. Avatar art by me.


I have no idea how else to describe games like this. But I have an EXTREME fascination of games where this is what you do. I love cataloguing and organizing alchemical reagents. I love exploring what can and can't be done when you introduce a certain element to a thingy. I love building libraries of knowledge and stores of elemental energy.

There's really only two games I can think of that've ever scratched this itch in this way, and I need to know if there's more. There's Thaumcraft, which is ancient, and outdated. And there's Book of Hours, which came out recently, but after discovering the creator is a creep I kinda want to find something else.

Does anyone know of any other games that can scratch this itch? I don't wanna just make a Minecraft Thaumcraft server for the sixth time lol


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in reply to @Lizstar's post:

I dunno if it's quite the same but have you played any of the Atelier games? they're JPRGs with a big alchemy/crafting focus down to like, genetic-style inheritance of traits from base materials to crafted items

Mysterium for the Game Boy is a very interesting take on alchemy. It's laid out like a DRPG/1st-person dungeons crawler, but instead of just fighting monsters, you mainly advance by exploring, gathering various metals and minerals, and then putting them in different elemental pools to create different ones, which in turn lets them be used to create other things.

I remember it feeling very complicated and intimidating, but it does a great job of making alchemy feel like a complex art you have to learn to get anywhere. Here's a video if this got you curious: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VZicMdz8A5I

Strange Horticulture, maybe? You've got a shop full of weird plants, a book of plant facts, and people coming to you with problems that can be solved by plants, and you need to match them all up.