Absolute Alchemical Potion is Lotos Project's first visual novel release on Steam. It is an otome romance and fantasy visual novel featuring a female alchemist Celsia working in seclusion to brew a potion of immortality. Unfortunately, she failed in her attempt, so she enlists the help of a mage, her contract-bound demon-raven familiar, and her golem servant to figure out what went wrong, and to gather another set of ingredients to make a new potion.
Pros | Cons |
- Good artwork and background music - Interesting characters and in-game lore - Well-defined player status and progress | - A little short to justify buying at full price - Humour could be brought out more - Issues with saving and loading game |
Absolute Alchemical Potion has plenty of attractive art in the form of blinking eyes, speech balloons, different-coloured character names, and cute chibis. This visual novel also has progressively unlockable story lore in the form of items in your bag and highlighted keywords in the glossary.
In terms of background music, Orchestic and Shy by GentlePunk help to bring out the fantasy and romance themes in the story and are very pleasant to listen to.
There are a few cons though, with the first being that the cute and expressive character artwork does not always match the tone of the text. This could be a disconnect where possibly I am not properly understanding the jokes, or that the jokes simply lack enough humour.
There is also no save/load file organization present, such as having multiple pages or sections that you save your game into. With the game having four routes with multiple endings, this makes finding the save file that you want to use to target a particular route or ending quite challenging as you scroll through one long list of save files.
It took around 4 hours to reach all endings and complete all the achievements. Helpful status window and ending conditions are clearly defined to help players get all endings and achievements.
Although Absolute Alchemical Potion is somewhat short, it is a good otome fantasy romance visual novel to pick up when it is discounted to be more proportional to the playing time, and I hope this game will qualify for trading cards and normal profile features in future.
Initial gameplay video with author narration on YouTube by Critiquing Doge
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