Hermes the Alchemist

Hermes the alchemist is blind since an explosion in his laboratory. Help him find his stuff.

How to play

You need audio to play this game

In the top half of the screen you have one to three shelves. In this shelves there are some ingredients. If you click on an ingredient you can hear it's sound. Below the shelves is the lab table. On this table you have to prepare the ingredients according to the formula you heard. As you are blind you don't see the ingredients. You can only hear them.

You hear the formula at the start of a level. If you want to listen to it again you can click on the left side of the screen. Once you have prepared the correct ingredients in the correct order you can click on the right side of the screen to finish the order. The ingredients stay on the table, the only exception being if you change the laboratory.

Voting results


This game entered in the Solo competition (36 entries).


Hermes the alchemist is blind ever since an explosion in his laboratory. Help him find his stuff.


Source Desktop (Java)



Comments (9)

2 years ago

Since the game is for the blind people, you should have focused on the audio. I barely understood what the story is and it was a little boring. Maybe because I'm not blind, I didn't understand the sounds either. Superb idea with poor implementation. And why didn't you opt-out on Graphics? Maybe you didn't have enough time. Thank you for your effort. This was enlightening nevertheless.

2 years ago

The idea that you have to click everywhere just to find out where the ingredients are turned out to be great. BUT you could add silhouette of the objects to appear when hermes touches them , so the player would better remember where he left his ingredients. And you have to work on your UI( it is not a part of the gameplay, so you can make it more visual) You can also add a tutorial inside the game and not on the gamepage

2 years ago

Overall good concept 7/10

2 years ago

Interesting Idea, but i found it very dificult to figure out what was going on. I would suggest making it so you could see where the items are that you can click, even if you make all the ingredients look identical so you have to use sound to identify them. Either that or use keyboard input instead of trying to select invisible objects with a cursor. I think some knd of sound based game could have potential, would almost be like a gameified version of an ear training program.

2 years ago

Nice idea, if you had more time I'm sure you'd had implemented in game tutorial and perhaps improve the visuals. If the point is he is blind, then I don't think you need to add visual clues.

2 years ago

Interesting idea! It could work very well on a touch screen, where you don't need to show anything at all, not even a cursor.

Sadly, some important instructions are missing, so it's very confusing to play. Do I need to drag ingredients to move them, or is it done by clicking? If the recipe calls for more than one ingredient, how do I combine them? Etcetera.

2 years ago

A strange but very original game idea! I had fun clicking everywhere to figure out where is each item, and managed to understand quick enough how things worked.

My main disappointment is I don't think the game has an ending? At some point the game seems to repeat the "you finished yet another formula" line, so I gave up after maybe 7-8 levels. Too bad because the narrative started like there would be an intrigue and actual story developments.

I have similar remarks as others in that the UI is still quite confusing, and would have worked better with @automatonvx idea of having it visible but all items look identical. Even if we stick with the current approach, the game would have gained from a clearer separation between the various zones of the screen - for instance I was regularly confused by accidentally replaying the formula when I just wanted to check what was on the left of my table.

Sound-wise, I like the narration and find the SFX are not exceptional but alright. My main problem was that replaying the formula was too slow: every time we play it (even accidentally), we lose between 5 & 10 seconds on the timer, waiting for it to end. Meanwhile we can hardly click on something else because it makes everything too confusing. The formula could have been played with much less delay between each item.

While there's plenty of remarks to make about this game, it's really because how experimental it is. It was one of the most original games I've played yet here, and even with all its issues I'm glad to have discovered it. So congrats for making this!

Oh, and the food update after each level is dark humor at its best :)

2 years ago

Interesting, original idea. The voice over is crucial, taken the audio focus, yet I found the pronounciation to be very distracting. There are some funny lines in the intro too: "After taking a close look, he realized he was blind". Intentional? Other than that I do like the sound effects, very unusual.

I got into the bigger lab, but could not progress much further as in one of the later missions I simply could not locate an ingredient, it was not on the shelf and not on the table. Could it be that it was behind another ingredient? I will never know.

The background is ghastly. The shelf is all crooked, but the ingredients seem to be located anywhere in the general area of it. I think simple labeled rectangles designating the four areas (shelf, table, repeat formula, finish order) would have been a cleaner more efficient solution.

Ok job, lacking in polish.

O 5, G 1, A 5, G 5, O 10, T 5

2 years ago

Lovely concept! I included it in my Alakajam #1 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :)

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