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solo_knightPlaythrough/Review: Combat Apothecary
What is it?
It’s a medium length game in which you do quests for the apothecary’s guild: slay monsters, brew potions, and either die a rather nasty death or honourably retire.
Is it playable out of the box?
With the best will in the world, no, it is not. It’s so unplayable that I walked away before the first miniboss because I spent far more time trying to work out what I’m supposed to do than actually playing.
Amendments:
Writing out the game rules with the help of the one playthrough by the creator, and even that wasn’t enough.
Tools
d3/d4/d6/d8
As it happens, I own a d3. I own several d3s, actually, a weird shaped blob, a Roman numbered D6, and a dodecahedronl D3 (I used this one. It’s shiny.). You can, of course, just use a standard D6 and halve it, but it’s an awkward die to call for.
Price:
Name your own price (I downloaded for free because I’m just trying things out. I treat these games – with the authors’ encouragement – as shareware. If I like it, I’ll pay for it, but I don’t want to stop trying out new things altogether, and I just cannot justify dropping money for things that have a good chance of being very unsatisfying experiences.
Let me be clear: I love that Indie Game Designers try out a huge range of scenarios and mechanics and really push the envelope on gaming; but many are just dipping their toes into game design. Which is great – I’ve done this myself and will do it again – but the results often are somewhat clunky.
Verdict
🪫 Very draining
I really like the idea of an alchemist/herbalist/apothecary, and the guild progression (five levels, each level has a miniboss and one big boss at the end) makes for a satisfying story shape in principle.
With a different combat mechanic and different random tables this might be quite fun, but at that point, you have a very different game that also happens to be about alchemists. Which is a great concept!
I reckon this would need to be about 20 pages: a bit more lore, clearer instructions, some samples, and enough of a story to get you started. (Two months ago I would have had zero chance to even start playing.)
Well. My first DNF, but after spending about 2h and not getting to the first combat while getting more and more frustrated I decided that I had too many unplayed games on my hard drive to invest any more time into an unplayable game.
What brought this game onto my radar originally was coming across this review (on substack) that piqued my interest.
(Looking at this playthrough again after I attempted to play myself I noticed that I missed a step that would have given me more resources. This playthrough uses a hexcrawl system bolted onto the game, I didn't.)
After reading the game and writing out all of the instructions in my own words with annotations, I can now see how many things the author of the playthrough added and assumed.
Plus the author, clearly more experienced with solo games than me, is able to interpret a cryptic utterance and translate it into actual gameplay instructions. I think the interpretation is valid and useful, I just didn't get there.
May use your Knack skill to allocate the Discipline specific purpose or aspect to the Ingredients.
I can use my injure and bleed skill to do what? allocate bleeding to the ingredients? Not the potion?
This becomes
As a note, every 'Class' has a knack you can use to alter your Purpose OR Aspect when finding ingredients. It's one or the other though, not both.
I now realise that the 'knack' equates to two of the 'aspects' of the potion (after the third read I am STILL confused about the connection between ingredient and potion), but anyway, that part is clearer, but I do not know what purpose my assassin character has other than the fucking obvious assassin = injure.
It's a game where you have to bring everything yourself: the character, the setting, the gameplay, the enemies… everything. You get a small matrix of 'Environ' (18 items) with entries like 'Fort, Acropolis, Kiln' and as many 'Essence' entries. ('scorch, corrupt, undead') which includes both 'ashen' and 'cinders'.
Even if the information were presented much better (there is *so much* talk of 'lore' which from context is the same as 'essence' because there's nothing else), I'd still hesitate to call it a game.
If I have to do all of the creation myself, I'd want a much more robust system with much clearer instructions.
I did roll a basic combat just to try out the system, but other than being very very confusing indeed, I also dislike how close to the edge the character lives all the time.
In my playthrough, I was supposed to fight an undead creature, which I decided should be a zombie.
My superpower is bleed.
So basically I either bend the narrative until it cries uncle, or I can't use my class feature.
So while I like the general idea and some mechanics like not knowing when you'll meet the boss – definitely a mechanic I want to try out again – I hated the combat system and the general confusion. This is more mental load than making up a game system on the fly.
What is it?
It’s a medium length game in which you do quests for the apothecary’s guild: slay monsters, brew potions, and either die a rather nasty death or honourably retire.
Is it playable out of the box?
With the best will in the world, no, it is not. It’s so unplayable that I walked away before the first miniboss because I spent far more time trying to work out what I’m supposed to do than actually playing.
Amendments:
Writing out the game rules with the help of the one playthrough by the creator, and even that wasn’t enough.
Tools
d3/d4/d6/d8
As it happens, I own a d3. I own several d3s, actually, a weird shaped blob, a Roman numbered D6, and a dodecahedronl D3 (I used this one. It’s shiny.). You can, of course, just use a standard D6 and halve it, but it’s an awkward die to call for.
Price:
Name your own price (I downloaded for free because I’m just trying things out. I treat these games – with the authors’ encouragement – as shareware. If I like it, I’ll pay for it, but I don’t want to stop trying out new things altogether, and I just cannot justify dropping money for things that have a good chance of being very unsatisfying experiences.
Let me be clear: I love that Indie Game Designers try out a huge range of scenarios and mechanics and really push the envelope on gaming; but many are just dipping their toes into game design. Which is great – I’ve done this myself and will do it again – but the results often are somewhat clunky.
Verdict
🪫 Very draining
I really like the idea of an alchemist/herbalist/apothecary, and the guild progression (five levels, each level has a miniboss and one big boss at the end) makes for a satisfying story shape in principle.
With a different combat mechanic and different random tables this might be quite fun, but at that point, you have a very different game that also happens to be about alchemists. Which is a great concept!
I reckon this would need to be about 20 pages: a bit more lore, clearer instructions, some samples, and enough of a story to get you started. (Two months ago I would have had zero chance to even start playing.)
Well. My first DNF, but after spending about 2h and not getting to the first combat while getting more and more frustrated I decided that I had too many unplayed games on my hard drive to invest any more time into an unplayable game.
What brought this game onto my radar originally was coming across this review (on substack) that piqued my interest.
(Looking at this playthrough again after I attempted to play myself I noticed that I missed a step that would have given me more resources. This playthrough uses a hexcrawl system bolted onto the game, I didn't.)
After reading the game and writing out all of the instructions in my own words with annotations, I can now see how many things the author of the playthrough added and assumed.
Plus the author, clearly more experienced with solo games than me, is able to interpret a cryptic utterance and translate it into actual gameplay instructions. I think the interpretation is valid and useful, I just didn't get there.
May use your Knack skill to allocate the Discipline specific purpose or aspect to the Ingredients.
I can use my injure and bleed skill to do what? allocate bleeding to the ingredients? Not the potion?
This becomes
As a note, every 'Class' has a knack you can use to alter your Purpose OR Aspect when finding ingredients. It's one or the other though, not both.
I now realise that the 'knack' equates to two of the 'aspects' of the potion (after the third read I am STILL confused about the connection between ingredient and potion), but anyway, that part is clearer, but I do not know what purpose my assassin character has other than the fucking obvious assassin = injure.
It's a game where you have to bring everything yourself: the character, the setting, the gameplay, the enemies… everything. You get a small matrix of 'Environ' (18 items) with entries like 'Fort, Acropolis, Kiln' and as many 'Essence' entries. ('scorch, corrupt, undead') which includes both 'ashen' and 'cinders'.
Even if the information were presented much better (there is *so much* talk of 'lore' which from context is the same as 'essence' because there's nothing else), I'd still hesitate to call it a game.
If I have to do all of the creation myself, I'd want a much more robust system with much clearer instructions.
I did roll a basic combat just to try out the system, but other than being very very confusing indeed, I also dislike how close to the edge the character lives all the time.
In my playthrough, I was supposed to fight an undead creature, which I decided should be a zombie.
My superpower is bleed.
So basically I either bend the narrative until it cries uncle, or I can't use my class feature.
So while I like the general idea and some mechanics like not knowing when you'll meet the boss – definitely a mechanic I want to try out again – I hated the combat system and the general confusion. This is more mental load than making up a game system on the fly.
