Setting a room full of enemies on fire is satisfying enough on its own. Getting them to rust apart, panic, and start swinging at each other because you soaked the floor in the wrong chemical first is a different kind of satisfying. That’s exactly the sort of chaos Alchemickal wants you chasing every time you walk into a new room.
Developed and published by rodbotic, Alchemickal released on July 13th, 2026, casting you as an everyday alchemist thrown into the job of stopping an arcane invasion armed with little more than a weapon and whatever chemickals you can get your hands on. It’s a twin-stick action roguelite built entirely around figuring out what to pour into your gun before the enemy in front of you figures out how to kill you first.
Your Weapons Are Only As Good As What You Pour Into Them
The alchemy system is the whole game. Imbuing a weapon with the right chemickal opens up effects like chain lightning arcing between enemies, acid that melts through armor, or flammable tar that turns one explosion into several. Ancient recipes scattered through the dungeon also keep expanding what combinations are actually possible.
Combat itself is fast, twin-stick, and built around improvisation rather than a fixed loadout. You’re expected to read what’s in front of you and adjust mid-fight, since the chemickal that worked perfectly on the last room’s enemies might do almost nothing to whatever’s waiting in the next one.
Enemies With Their Own Bad Habits
Enemies come organized into factions, each with elemental affinities and quirks that make them vulnerable to specific kinds of trouble. Some bleed out when cut the right way, others corrode and fall apart once exposed to the right chemical, and a few can be turned against their own allies if you understand what sets them off.
That design turns encounters into puzzles as much as fights. Recognizing which quirk applies to what’s in front of you, and having the right chemickal loaded to exploit it, matters more than raw firepower. The game also leans hard into rewarding that kind of observation over simply outgunning everything in the room.
No Two Trips Through the Cauldron Look the Same
Every weapon carries its own upgrade tree, and the dungeons themselves are procedurally generated, filling each run with a different mix of hazards, ambushes, and layouts to work through. Between runs, a cosmic entity offers a rotating set of buffs, while hidden cauldrons tucked away in the dungeon hand out new alchemical recipes to bring into the next attempt.
Permadeath means all of that gets put to the test eventually, resetting your progress and sending you back in with whatever you’ve managed to unlock along the way. Between the weapon trees, the rotating buffs, and the recipes still waiting to be found, no two runs end up assembling the same toolkit.
A Small Chemistry Set With a Lot of Combinations
What makes Alchemickal hold together is how much it leans on reading a fight rather than just surviving it. The alchemy system only works if you’re paying attention to what’s actually in front of you, and that constant back-and-forth between planning your loadout and reacting to whatever a room throws at you is where the game finds its identity.
With 13 achievements built around its recipes, factions, and the chaos you can cause by combining them, there’s a tidy, focused list of things to chase once the basic loop of pouring the wrong chemical on the right enemy starts to click.