This is a great idea, and for a while I was really excited about the game, interested in it, and looking for good things to give it a great review. Unfortunately, the more I played, the less good things I could find about it, until concluding that it's really good and interesting for maybe an hour of gameplay.

The game is released, but littered with bugs. Some are cosmetic, such as parts of models not loading, or loading some few meters to the side, music switching too rapidly (and I truly believe that having one good track over the entire game would be much better than having free tunes everyone heard a thousand time from youtube); others are gameplay bugs, such as creatures you made in your previous session resetting and losing all their improvements or disappearing altogether (fare well, Malady, my best fighter girl, you shall be missed as you disappeared on load). I have an entire save, for example, with four creatures floating up and down, needling themselves on their own disembodied arms (some are considered to be still attached to the creature, others are considered never to be there), and I'm half-considering opening a paid рornhub channel dedicated to this [sexy music starts here]. At times, the counter that will signify how close you are to an end game will start going backwards, and sometimes stop altogether. The tutorial is quite confusing, trying to push too much into too little of time, and the idea that you can only go through it once, or skip and never have a chance to is absolutely ludicrous. Dev blog implies content creation over bug fixes as well, and it's quite disappointing, as more content = more bugs, while the previous ones are staying unfixed.

However, despite all of this, and the bugs aren't the biggest reason for a negative review: the fact that it's tedious and boring is. It's good for an hour or two, however, the constant running around, looking for ingredients that look pretty much the same and are chaotically scattered around the closet too big for its functionality is so tiresome.

Let me explain how this works from a player perspective. To make any sort of progress, you need to make what is basically a potion out of at least for reagents, and one sort of lynch-pin. You have two pairs of lynch-pins, and five pairs of ingredients. Opposite pairs cannot be combined, so if, for instance, you have a pair of red reagents: red-A and red-B, you cannot put them both into your concoction or it won't work. And this is all well and good before you realise that at the start you only can mix two reagents (with a possibility to upgrade your station to mix five or six at a time). Then you realise you have to run all over the floor (and the devs made this place quite spacious, which is good and comfortable, but running in or out of the warehouse takes way too much time). To help with this, you can grab a basket that was never introduced in a tutorial that may hold six different reagents (disregard the fact the controls of the basket are tedious on its own - you never can guwess whether you'll grad a basket or a reagent in it, it's basically pixel-hunting). And at first you feel yourself great: you're a mad scientist rushing all over the place, looking for different kinds of things to add to their evil potion to resurrect the dead! But after maybe three resurrection, you're just becoming tired of making the same long tedious task over and over again with no variety. To make that creature you need this potion of at least four reagents and a lynch-pin, to improve one of four limbs you need this potion of at least four reagents and a lynch-pin, to give one of three temporary improvements you need this potion of at least four reagents and a lynch-pin, to partially heal the creature you need this potion of at least four reagents and a lynch-pin... see the problem now? It won't take long until you are tired of the tedious task of looking for another bottle of slightly different shade of green that you already put into your concoction, and going over and over the same thing again to create one single powerful creature, which requires at least eight of such concoctions, not considering an upkeep and the fact that your brain gets so tired of doing the same task over and over again, you start forgetting which reagents you already put in, and need to run back to check. And then there's also the task of cleaning up, because when you make this potion of at least four reagents and a lynch-pin, you pour it into one flask, but you have another four left, which you have to collect one by one and throw away, else every single free space would be covered in spare unused flasks.

Now, out of the player perspective, and into gamedesigner perspective. There are ways to improve this experience. Some of them are really easy to make, such as bug fixes, visual variety for reagents specifically, the ability to use your both hands, working with light in the storage room so reagents don't change colour entirely when on different shelves (it's the only way to distinguish them from afar, and I am impressed by how a blue reagent would look red when I put it on a further shelf with reddish tint). Others are a bit more complex, such as implementing any use for elixirs (potions with less reagents than you need), maybe a sort of automatic brewery system for those elixirs which would make small amount of those every day by using reagents you have in your storeroom. Upgrades for making storage more comfortable. Better cleaning system, maybe even a quest to assemble a cleaning robot maid, since we're a mad scientist that will take all the spare bottles out in the end of the day.

There is a lot of love and potential here, but this looks like a proof of concept, or a pre-alpha of a game made by young enthusiasts, but not a released product, and it surely does not cost twenty bucks. It looks and feels good, I really love how responsive the movement is, and how well the devs have developed a feeling of space. Art is decent too, though I feel like it will become old way too fast, so maybe a more stylised approach is better for such a game. However, it is too repetitive and tedious; more repetitive and tedious than fun. And games are supposed to be above all FUN.