Alchemic Cutie is a farming sim that combines aspects from two other popular agriculture games: Stardew Valley and Slime Rancher.  You play as Yvette, a young lady who has just graduated from Alchemy School.  She lives with her family on their slime farm, and now she’ll use her newfound skills to raise and breed slimes and help out the townsfolk.  Alchemic Cutie is available on all current game consoles and PC, but reviewed on PS4 here.

If you’ve played a game like Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon, or Story of Seasons, you’ll catch onto this one pretty easily.  But the game still starts you out with a tutorial.  You’ll walk around your slime farm and surrounding town and areas in a top down fashion, with graphics very similar to those other titles.  The game runs on an in-game clock, so you can go home and eat lunch and dinner with your family to regain some energy, for instance.  Most things you do require a bit of energy to pull off, from catching slimes to breeding them.

As you walk around, you can gather all sorts of items and talk to people to do favors and quests for them.  If you run across a slime, you can play your flute by it and it’ll be yours to keep.  You can attach a balloon to it to send it back to your ranch, or put it in your backpack for a ride.  There are many different slimes and you can breed them for all sorts of combinations and traits.  Slimes make good companions, can eat garbage, and even their poop has uses, so they’re the “Thneed” of this world.

I had two problems with this game that kept me from staying interested.  One is that the tutorial doesn’t explain everything very well, like what you’re supposed to do at shrines.  Also the menus and interfaces are quite fiddly.  But if you enjoy games like Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon, Story of Seasons, and/or Slime Rancher, you may want to check this one out anyway.

Kid Factor:

Alchemic Cutie is rated E for Everyone with an ESRB descriptor of Crude Humor.  And that comes from the slime poop.  They can even poop in your backpack (lovely).  Because of the high level of reading skill required and complicated gameplay, I’d say this one’s best for older kids only.

Tags: Game Reviews