2nd time ive tried this, some thoughts as i play

• i think the simpler tutorial is more effective and fun to play around in
• this is just a random thought, but damn in the shooting animation the character must be really limp wristing the gun for it to kick back and bend his elbows that much
• the bit of slowdown on mixing i think is a great addition and makes the game alot easier to learn. maybe im just better at mixing since it is my 2nd time
• i usually dont mind one hit kills in games but the elite enemies laser beam really annoyed me, i was looking at another enemy and was surprised when i saw my health hit -150 until i realized what happened. maybe there should be a highlight or something before the attack comes out, or maybe im just a brainlet. this happened to me the last time i played too
• i think unlocking the 2nd tier combos is a good simplification to not overwhelm new players as well
• i had an elite combat where i stacked tons of defense down on the electric element boss, and spammed ice+lightning fast scythe strikes with the lightning bolt every 3rd chain ability. this did a ton of damage and felt great and extremely fun, and is the kind of synergy you can only get in this specific game. i think i genuinely soy-faced
• the freezing challenge shrine was really annoying imo, it was really unclear that it was a straight DPS check and wasnt going to stop expanding. the 2nd one i tried i knew i had to be fast, so i got out my scythe to start clearing things as they spawn, only for freeze mines to spawn and stunlock me to death instantly. fuck these things
• i never went for the damage type resistance upgrades which usually occupied half the slots in the shop since they are so much less interesting than the cooler options with potential synergies
• game still looks and sounds great

It was fun! it has a lot of potential. I usually dont mind dying and restarting in these kinds of games but something about getting confused, stunlocked, and one shotted made me want to take a break, so i'll come back to it later. keep up the great work!

First time I'm playing Alhemickal. Here's some gameplay and things I felt strongest about.

• -I thought alchemy system will be clunky with having to juggle 6 elements, but it's really well done. Deciding how much element to use per attack is a fun mechanic. Making combinations is not annoying thanks to slowmo (unlike in Magicka), I'm curious how it holds up for 3 or more element combinations.
• -Fighting feels really dynamic, with slowmo giving time to analyze the situation and set the elements. Even when the room is full of enemies and you're left almost no hp, it never feels chaotic unlike in some games where you don't know what the fuck is going on when there's too many enemies and bullets.
• -Loading protips last too short to read them.
• -It took me like 30 minutes to understand you can have only 1 upgrade per row. I thought you first need upgrade on the left to unlock upgrade on the right.
• -59:43 I was trying to make tar and didn't understand why it's not working. Later I understood that special chemicals need to be unlocked for each new run, but it's not clear since you can see them as discovered/unlocked in the almanac.
• -Nice shoopkeeper interactivity.
• -Visuals look good, but enviros are samey.
• -Getting frozen by ice enemies feels like insta-death sentence, when there's many of them.
• -Really like the almanac. Very readable (expect for status effectiveness, no idea what that is)
• -Toxin needs more love as a unique element. I just realized I never really used it expect as a combination component.

Very solid demo. I can't think of anything actually bad about the game even in the current state. It just needs more and content like enviros. I had good fun during that hour.

thoughts:

• add fps limiter, fans go crazy because its running a million frames a second
• does the mix reset when right click? not sure if i prefer that
• I picked up a scroll that said mix two things but not sure waht it was, maybe i missed it in the almanac
• the upgrades from booba lady was a lot of number changing, wish they had more gameplay impact (like the dash)
• as bit too easy i think? Maybe i didnt play far enough but constant chest and barrel healing always kept me topped up
• Mixing alchemy is cool but nothing really pushed me to use it
• Kind of cool doing a mix that lowers their defence then switching to their weakness. but its annoying having to manually remember and do the mixes each time. creates this weird downtime right clicking or even worse opening the almanac. What i learned from deadwire is that you want to highlight and enable these things as short as possible in these type of games. Perhaps show the recipes in the right click menu.

Good luck

Fire trial is much easier, I think you might have disabled the other trials for testing and forgot about it because I only found fire trials in like 4 runs.
This guy got spawned outside the map by one of those boss turned regular enemy in floor 3:

Good twist by the way, it works well as a regular enemy.

I entered a boss chamber on floor 3 and it got filled to the brim with floating orbs, thankfully the virulent update plus steam is great at thinning hordes like that. Virulent update + fire trial buff also caused some fun chain reactions that cleared whole rooms.

The new boss was good. I found it easy enough to keep track of both of them and I thought it was neat how they can damage each other.

Whenever I get set on fire I usually do water + health but if I do that with the barrier upgrade I get neither water nor health and I die. 

I think maybe the chem tank upgrades should be given in some other ways because they feel mandatory to get first.

It was fun to finish again.

Smaller maps are an improvement and I'm able to clear the demo on the first try now. Would add milliseconds to the Time since other games place that there.

The enemies that explode do way too much damage I feel. it felt like rocket tag. I think melee is not worth it unless you have the cold+poison mixture that makes you super fast, with it it felt incredibly fun to play but without it going into melee was pretty much an immediate death sentence. lightning is flatly the best base element. because the rooms are often small I did not see the point in switching out of it except for an emergency heal or to keep my cold+poison buff up. speaking on healing, it's also fairly weak. the only time I felt the need to switch to it was purely out of desperation because I got chunked in like half a second.