Look, let's be honest, demos are a dime a dozen during digital festivals, but Alchemortis just made its presence known by dropping a fresh trial as part of the ongoing Steam Next Fest. You are thrown headfirst into a Cthulhu-inspired universe where inventory management meets auto-battler combat. The hook here revolves around tossing ingredients into an alchemical cauldron to forge items and sacred relics, ultimately building out your loadout. At the moment, the demo lets you mess around with two playable characters alongside dozens of items and relics ready for experimentation.

In what the developer calls deep tactical progression, you get to dump abyssal tentacles, clerical relics, and venomous reagents straight into the cauldron to craft gear. You might infuse ordinary scrap metal with divine judgment or coat demonic artifacts in bleeding and poisoning effects. Several core builds are waiting for you, including the source of plague, the summoner of death, and entities from the abyss. By mixing traits and items together, you can orchestrate mechanics ranging from continuous erosion to sudden, explosive bursts of poison.

Every single slot in your backpack demands careful strategic planning. Players will face bizarre-looking tools and have to weigh the exact value of every square centimeter of inventory space. Smart positioning of adjacent grid slots triggers synergy resonance, keeping faction builds and item types in harmony. Taking down bosses allows you to expand the edges of your grid and unlock hidden four-way abilities. Precise calculations are mandatory when placing items, as every single slot serves as a vital piece in engineering a lethal trap.

When facing a fog-shrouded crossroads, players must decide whether to risk losing their sanity by challenging tough foes or safely hunt down an obelisk to alter the fate of the stage. Without any clunky controls getting in the way, the auto-battler battlefield purely tests your tactical wisdom in putting together builds. Even when you fail, the game rewards you by letting you accumulate forbidden knowledge. By firing up ancient technologies in an out-of-run furnace, you can unlock lost relics, unknown potions, and disciples of various schools, achieving permanent progression through endless trial and error.