Alchemist's Alcove is an exploration-first, old-school roguelike where you create powerful spells and useful gear from the remains of the foes you defeat. Move through ancient, conflict-torn regions, battling enemies, experimenting with alchemical recipes, uncovering hidden lore-and inevitably meeting your end again and again.
The game centers on learning: there’s no persistent power grind, only the knowledge you collect. Record discoveries in your notebook, study enemy components and behaviors, and piece together the Alcove’s history as you work toward forging the Philosopher’s Stone.
Designed to be approachable but deep, the crafting system is easy to pick up yet forces careful resource management. Mix and match components to build spells, weapons, and tools from a wide variety of options. The world itself is static-landscapes and landmarks remain consistent across runs-so exploration rewards patience and observation with secrets, story fragments, and strategic advantages.
Fight. Craft. Discover. Die. Repeat-each attempt sharpens your understanding and brings you closer to unraveling the Alcove’s mysteries.
DEMO Next Fest Content Update
Hi all! Exciting stuff to announce today!Firstly, Alchemist's Alcove is participating in the Steam Next Fest starting October 13th! To celebrate, and encourage players to continue exploring the Alcove, I've added some new hidden content for players to comb through a day before the event begins. It all starts with this fella: the Scourgelion Scout!The Scourgelion Colony was originally a faction I planned on introducing in post-demo content, however I wanted to make the Dungeon area more engaging. It only had one enemy type, and uninteresting drops, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to introduce a new enemy that could provide the player with more resources!The Scourgelion Scout will drop goop and sulfur, as well as chitin, a new material that's used in several new items: a healing spell, a burning spell and weapon, two summoning spells, and a translocation weapon! I'm most excited about the burning spell shown above! Buffs and debuffs are something I've been trying to avoid, as every spell in the game is something the player has fought and killed for. This makes it so that set-up spells with low initial impact feel worse to use. However, content in the full game will demand the player to wield spells and tools that allow them to focus on multiple parts of the battlefield at once, meaning they'll need access to long-term debuff spells. I've decided to try out adding two debuff-focused items to Alchemist's Alcove in demo-accessible content to try it out, though as a heads up the recipes will be quite hard to discover! And finally, there's a new optional boss fight off...
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