RPGM - An Alchemist's Tale [3.7 Alpha] [Captain Allegretto Games]

Have you ever sat down at a nice all you can eat restaurant and the waitress walks over to you and explains that this restaurant is different from others, the wait staff will bring you as much food as you can handle! You think it's interesting and sure why not, the food on the menu is right up my alley after all! Then you see it, the first plate! The beautiful waitress sets it down in front of you and there’s a nice little cracker with some meat on it, half a bite maybe… You eat it hungrily and to your surprise it wasn't that bad! But then you notice there's no second waitress on their way, in fact it looks like they have forgotten about you, so you wait, and wait, and wait… till you're about to get up and go eat somewhere else. The moment you slide your chair back the same beautiful waitress places another plate in front of you… half a bit of steak stares back at you.

Does this analogy sound long and drawn out? Almost like I wanted to keep you reading for a certain amount of time? Perhaps you would go as far to think I’m wasting your time? Well if you’re thinking about playing An Alchemist's Tale, get ready for all these same feelings to rear their head at every moment.

At first I thought this was one of those tales you hear about all the time within the adult genre, a game with great potential but a Dev caught in their own head, disconnected from feedback, busy making their creation, blind to the world. But alas they seem very active and engaged on here and they own their own thread!? So why is it that all these easy free wins for the dev remain untouched… “What free wins do you refer to?” I hear you cry! Well…

Content progression: There is content here, and good stuff too! The tags don't disappoint and the art is good! But it’s all buried under garbage that you have to sift through like a junky looking for their next hit. Having a game that offers you ANYTHING to do while you wait for the next content beat is a good game, but An Alchemist's Tale almost refuses to offer something to do while you wait, instead it asks you to search like a peasant. No directions to where another scene might be, no icons pointing the way, invisible friendship numbers that aren't met? To fucking bad! All during a 7 day week and you might have missed something because you checked the 7th window on the 3rd floor of the 14th house on TUESDAY not WEDNESDAY! DUU!

Mini-games?: In the history of adult gaming I honestly can't think of a single game that “clicky button fast” and numbers goes “brrrrrr” or “tip tapppy when bar in green” and number does “brrrrrr” or catch the totally fun FPS breaking mushroom flying across your screen so number can go “brrrrrrr” is in any way shape or from fun. No one likes these, literally no one. But here they are? Why? When I talk about free wins this is it. Get rid of these!

Time gated Griiiiiind-ables: Asking a player base to collect 10 bear asses is a staple of gaming, so do it! add it in! No one is unhappy about progressing a plot by exploring your world and searching for the items needed. But to lazily place the item needed and instead of making it interesting just slap a “wait 5 days and btw fuck you” text box on it is just asking people to leave your game… Another insane free win ripe for the taking!

Now what really chaps my ass, is why am I bothering writing this review? Did I get conned into wasting 4 hours playing An Alchemist's Tale? Yes, but that's not the issue. The issue is I can scroll back and see reviews from 3 years ago for V1.0 Alpha and they already pointed out all the same exact shit, all these glaring 0 effort free wins! Seeing the Dev talk about the game being a “labor of love” while disregarding the criticism that I guarantee nails the exact reason 99% of players close his game and leave without a word is infuriating! The fact that you can sum up every issue with this game on a napkin and nothings been done about it for Three whole flipping years makes me want to cry.

And to prove the point?
Ditch the minigames, make collectables a one time thing or move them to contained areas (cave for cave herbs) that are easier to get to (quick travel) so the player can grab as many as needed when needed. Scene / events will always force trigger no matter the day or time when player enters the area / talks to NPC, if player doesn’t have the “friendship is magic” points for the scene it simply tells them AND WHERE TO GET FRIENDSHIP SCORE UP (Very simple text box pops up “would you like to skip to [time of day] for [NPC name] event?). Add a proper hint book or available quests book and where to start them. Clean up / downsize the forest areas by 50% and last but not least to summarize all previous points stop punishing people from enjoying your game. Oh and it's 2025, add a damn gallery. Next patch drops with all that and we can all watch as this game jumps to number one with 500 new subs to boot.

Best of luck,

This is bisexual dream content. Some of the art is better than other pieces, and there's an annoying amount of what amounts to fetch quests for the ingredients, but the actual emotion and eroticism is top notch. I really need to see cute guys get destroyed like this more often (before they do some destroying of their own).

V 3.1(Alpha)

The is very grindy and there's not much content to make up for it. Like there are spawn timers for ingredients and some even require mini games. The ingredients needed for making potions is also quite high compared to the amount of time it takes to farm them and can be very infuriating since I feel like it serves no purpose other than to waste my time. The art is subpar except for Josie, I really liked Josie.

Overall it has an interesting premise that ticks all the right boxes for me, but the lack of content and the grindinessof the game comes too much in the way of me enjoying it. Also you can't progress through some of the girl's scenes without a guide because the game never hints or points you to a direction of what you should do and even then the walkthrough is vague.

Beautiful game, the writing, the ambience, the characters, the variety, it's overall an extremely good game. Though it's only starting so obviously it still has a lot of things that need to be polished. The overall gameplay loop needs to be rebalanced since it's very grindy and not super fun.
As of right now, the most appealing thing in the game are the characters. There is a nice variety, both in personality and in body types (which is pretty fucking welcomed since most porn games have like 2-3 body types and it's tiring to see the same thing all the time) with some great and some needing some (others a lottttt of) work still. My favorite are Green and Mary, I can see where the author wants to take them and I like it a lot. A lot of the other characters are pretty shallow right now and they aren't super developed, but the foundations are there and they seem pretty solid.
As I said, I love the writing, this also includes sex scenes, I would argue that giving the player a little bit of more control during sex scenes could be better, but overall they're good. Where they could be improved significantly is the art and composition of the scenes. The art lacks cohesion overall in the game and the style changes sometimes very abruptly. This took me out of immersion at some points (green flying scene, Mary tit job, etc).
The music is pretty good, it really does immerse you into the feeling of being in a small and quaint village. Specially that first time when I went into the woods I felt how well the game had immersed me into the setting.
Quest need a little bit of work too, they bug sometimes, and they need some quality of life upgrades (I didn't do any quest/almost no conversation with your dad's "friend" because I went looking for green immediately). Also some of the dialogue related to quest need work (How much the cauldron actually cost for example, I though I still needed 100 gems with the discount)
As I said, the game is great, but just starting, so just keep an eye on it since you will want to play it in the future.

Very nice game. One of my first RPGM and it has everything I wanted.

The Futa/BBW content was a nice addition.

For an alpha the game is very good, I hope there will be more updates. (Version Alpha 2.71)

Good game.

I like everything in this game, from the premise to the characters and the grind is in the right amount so i don't mind it. But the only thing i do mind is inconsistent art. It is weird to see the MC's body suddenly changes from scene to scenes. But then again, that issue did not give a huge effect to my enjoyment for this game. Honestly, as someone who feels like we need more twink gay (or bisexual) protagonist games on this website, i can confidently say that I LOVE THIS GAME.

As of 2.3 this game has ponential but there is not much content. The sex scenes are good but the grind can be really annoying and the minigames are not one handed friendly. The intro takes about an hour and is very tedious, honestly worth skipping.

Version Played: 2.2 Alpha
Time Played: About 6 hours. Completed most content with the exception of Rain's and Bilia's final events.

I absolutely adore games where sexuality is treated as a celebrated part of human nature and An Alchemist's Tale does just that. As it stands now, the story is interesting and entertaining though more in the background, but the characters are all well-defined and with adequate personality.

Pros
+ Open sexuality with a variety of characters, body types and kinks
+ Charming art
+ Engaging setting with good English
+ Bush used the right way! (Cannot wait to see what Maria's got going on downstairs!!!!)

Neutral
= RPG Maker (I'm not a fan...)
= As the creator commissions the H art, it varies between characters, so YMMV. For my part, I actually found Rain's portrait image cuter than her H images...

Cons
- Fairly grindy -- a lot of that 6 hours was spent hoofing it from one end of the map to another searching for ingredients or performing repetitive tasks...so there's not really a lot of substantive content when all is said and done
- Not really one-handed play friendly as there some minigames where you need to use the keyboard
- Several characters with sexual interactions don't have any detailed portraiture.
- More of a personal issue, but some of the scenes just have disembodied dicks just there doing their thing. I get that the art is commissioned and more detail equals more money, but it's kind of a buzz kill. I also kinda wanna see who I'm fucking....

I really enjoyed my time with this game and am itching to see more. I cannot stress how much I enjoyed the freedom of sexuality in this world and how everyone is raring to go. On the flipside, this is still very early with a very long way to go. Overall, this game comes very recommended in spite of the issues raised above.

Note to devs: Thank you very much for this fantastic adventure! I cannot wait to see where this goes!

[v2.1 Alpha]
I am confused.
And the art is below the average.

-Story, Originality
Nothing unique.

-Renders
The pictures have some middle quality art and the animations are pretty bad.

-Sound
Average.

-Playability
Played it once and don't think I want to play it again.

-Performance
Runs like an average RPGM game.

-Bugs
H-scenes always bug out and most of them work poorly.

-Animations
Simply animations.

-Voice Acting
No voices (Or I am forgetting them).

-Grammar
Didn't see any mistakes.

-Amount of content
Normal ammount of content, a bit unfinished.
But a lot of stuff works with bugs or breaks.

Probably the most enjoyable protagonist I've ever seen on this site; the people and quests are actually interesting, showing that the author has excellent writing skill. The only downside is that the gameplay itself is extremely tedious, it took 20 hours to complete what has been uploaded so far, and that was not terribly much. In the future I hope that like the advanced fishing rod the tedium can be expedited, especially for the ones that are button mashers.
The only other pet peeve I have is that some of the characters went past thick into boob monster territory, I'm not sure why. Regarding the ntr content others have complained about, its extremely tame; you aren't in a relationship at any point and people have casual sex more frequently, as is normal in a porn game. The closest thing to it is not only labelled, but it occurs only if you make it happen, otherwise it does not. I hope this stays true for the rest of the updates, as it's the ideal way to implement it.

Having finished all the available content in v1.90 Alpha, I can say that this game is a 4.5/5 for me. It is enjoyable and has some nice humor, good art, and clear effort put into it. In addition, Almost all the scenes are avoidable if they aren't your cup of tea, because you can decide which characters to interact with (past the first meeting of course) and further their story and which characters not to without any impact on the main plot. The one thing I didn't like was that I had no agency over the decisions the MC takes in certain situations where I felt like I should have had some. I discussed it with the developer (who is very active here, which is another plus!) and he explained to me his train of thought behind those decisions and how the story will develop later on taking them into account. He was very nice and his plan, even though I personally disagree with how he implemented it, was a perfectly reasonable one.

Overall, I definitely recommend this game, and I think it will get even better later on when what the dev explained to me gets implemented .

+ art is really good, for the most part
- some of the girls just look fat in an ugly manner instead of thicc in a sexy manner
- horrible minigames to help level up your carpal tunnel syndrome
- RPGM
- The description claims that [trans], [NTR], and [rape] are avoidable, but they will still happen off-screen no matter what you choose. You only get to choose whether you watch or not.

This is a game exclusively for NTR fans who also enjoy breaking their wrists on bad minigames.
It should really be more upfront about this instead of trying to present those as optional.

This game is really really good, and I am extremely appreciative to see a game with the particular kind of bi content this game has (though giving the male characters besides the protag their own portraits would be a great improvement!)

Writing is really good, the characters are well thought-out and designed, and the gameplay loop requires work but not enough that it feels like grind most of the time.

While I think the mixture of artists for H-scenes works just fine and the styles really don't clash with one another, I think that hiring an artist on as part of the development team would really help to streamline things and reduce the time and cost needed to finish the game.

People shitting on this game about the NTR planned which is not even in the game yet and will not be for months need to fucking chill. Like I know F95 is gonna F95 and they have a righteous hate-boner against NTR but it's your game and you should put what you like in it, if it fits a coherent theme.

Edit for newer updates: this game still stands out to me as an exemplar of its genre, and continues to make my little bi heart soar. Very excited to see Captain Allegretto continue to work on this.

- This game may be in the early stages of development but shows great promise.
Especially if the kinks that are in the game and the ones that are yet to come are ones you like. I know they are for me!
- At some moments it can be a little difficult to figure out what you have to do, but looking around a little better will lead you to what you need.
- For now I give this a 4/5 star rating because it is a little rough around some edges. But I am positive the developer will work it all out in time.

Review for v1.0 Alpha

Pros:
Lots of money spent on art and it's noticable.
Potential for the future I guess?
Active dev taking feedback (!)

Taste based stuff:
Some of the fat characters are just weird, I like both thicc and sometimes even fat women, but the way they're drawn here is... off-putting. Can't really put it any other way, maybe that's just me though.
NTR skippable but not avoidable even on non-NTR routes. Seems like a weird/bad decision to make since it would be so easy to just handwave stuff away into not happening, but maybe the dev makes it really integral to the story even in the routes not focused on it later on. Either way, doesn't really impact the overall game quality, just the audience it can reach.

Cons:
Absolutely abysmal minigames that seem designed to piss the player off. I don't think that was the intention, the dev just seems to think that busywork and arcade games enhance a porngame somehow (they don't, good gameplay can be amazing in a porngame, but if it's just bad there's no reason not to just leave it out.)
Weird tedium like chance based scenes you have to keep checking to eventually get, this also has no point in existing, just build in some way to trigger it (or not trigger it) and everybody's happy. I understand that some devs want to "surprise" players and it has value, but tedium (especially without challenge) should never be the price to get to that surprise if you actually want to.
Maps are too long/complicated, movement speed too slow. The dev fixed the movement speed in his current build he's working on from what I read, but that won't unfuck the maps, I doubt he'll rework all of them so maybe he'll just remember that for later additions or add in some quicktravel options.
Remember all that money spent on art? It went to different artists, so the artstyle/quality is inconsistent which is extremely immersion breaking (at least for me).
Morning/afternoon/evening system that I'd usually put in the pro-category is just kinda empty in the afternoon at this point, the dev might fix this, but currently it just causes even more tedium.
Not much content. It's an early version so that's to be expected, should be fixed rather naturally as the game progresses.

All in all 2/10, would not recommend (for now), however if the taste based things don't bother you too much, the game has potential, it'll just take a year or two (probably two, there seems to be a lot of content planned) unless you want to fall into that trap of just replaying a tediously designed game for content updates.
Just look at a CG gallery of it for now.

This rewiew was created on basis of the very first release:

Pro:
- Good Art, Story and maps
- A wide variety of cast, including monster girls and humans alike.
- A working concept of ingame-time, with the NPCs and Story adjusting accodingly.
- Both Sub and Dom sex scenes with at least one castmember (harpy)

Con:
- A little grindy, mainly annoying in getting money at the very start
- Quite long footpaths (but a fasttravel system with a female harpy is already planned)

Neutral:

- There is no direct "battle-fuck" system most other games like to use on their monstergirls, but instead a very minor system with character stats and DnD like dice-throws to determine sub or dom scenes.


Overall a very promising first version and depending on the next release, this might become worthy of some of my rare monetary support as well. (I might have a softspot for harpys, sorry not sorry)

Really enjoyed it for a first release. Solid amount of content, the cgs were great and felt pretty consistent even from coming from multiple artist. The cast feels fresh and diverse. This game has a distinct vision from the creator, it is not meant for everyone that's for sure.

Personally i'm always a fan when a creator makes a story decision or design choice that isn't conventional. Otherwise we end up with just another game where a bunch of brain dead women throw their vaginas at you (although it doesn't hurt to have a character like that for 'content' purposes, can be fun to satirize as well)

One negative i will say as a warning to others, like all rpgm there is quite a bit of grinding. I ended up just save editing/cheating my way through the stats to get to the content. After doing that i had a much better time, although it would be nice if there was a way to warp around different locations and not just the town. Too much walking! Good first release overall though, hope this game gets some support.