A shop full of light, with every bottle in the wrong place

Something went wrong overnight. All 2,080 potions in your stock are on the floor: hand-named, numbered, labeled, and in a heap.

Nothing is broken and nothing is on fire. It is simply a very large mess, and you have as long as you like to put it right.

Alchemess is a cozy first-person sorting game. You pick up bottles, you carry them, you work out which shelf each one belongs on, and you put it down. That is the whole game. It turns out that is plenty.

No timer. No fail state. Nothing chasing you.

Put a bottle in the wrong slot and nothing happens. Walk over, pull it back out, try again. A mistake costs you the walk and nothing else.

Put one in the right slot and it locks in with a soft green swell, and stays there for good.

The shop saves every ten seconds, mis-shelved bottles included. Close the game halfway through a heap and tomorrow it will be exactly as you left it.

• There is no way to lose. The only pressure is the pleasant kind.

• Correct is permanent. Every bottle you get right is one you never think about again.

• Three difficulty modes, from numbered tags on every slot to a shop that hides its colors until you have earned them.

• Purist mode if you want no help at all. Eyes, memory, and the map in your head.

2,080 bottles that are actually there

The heap on the floor runs on real physics. Walk into it and bottles part around your legs, roll, knock into each other and settle. Pull a bottle out of the middle of a stack and everything above it notices.

Every bottle is an object with a label, and it stays wherever physics leaves it.

• 2,080 potions: 260 hand-written names across 8 vessel shapes, each numbered No 1 to No 2080.

• 24 shelves lettered Alpha through Omega, plus a golden Sun shelf and a silver Moon shelf.

• The labels are properly printed: aged parchment, a letterpress watermark of the shelf's own letter, a vermillion drop cap edged in gold, hand-set type. No AI art anywhere. Pick a bottle up and read it.

Potion of Avoided Hug-Handshake Collision

All 260 names were written by hand and sorted into 26 themed shelves.

• Elixir of the Lich Who Just Wants a Hug

• Tonic of Invisible Until the Bill Arrives

• Serum of Hindsight Delivered in Advance

• Brew of the Nap That Fixed Everything

• Potion of Arrows Politely Missing You

• Remedy of Midnight Snacks Without Consequences

• Concoction of Exploding Into Confetti (Should Un-Explode After)

• Ambrosia of Poltergeist Paying Monthly Rent

The shelves group them by theme, so tidying doubles as reading. Begin at Alpha (Beginnings & Firsts), doze at Zeta (Sleep & Dreams), meet the neighbors at Kappa (Ghosts & Yokai), haggle at Sigma (Goblin Economics), and take your bow at Omega (Dramatic Exits).

Glass worth holding up to the light

The bottles are the reason this game exists.

• Liquid that moves. It sloshes when you carry it, leans when you turn, foams when you shake it and settles when you set it down.

• Reflective glass. Every bottle mirrors the room around it: candlelight, the glass domes, the shelves, other bottles. The reflections move across the glass as you turn it.

• The color is in the liquid, not painted on the glass. Darker where the bottle is thick, brighter at the edges.

A shop that changes all day and all night

Real time passes overhead. The sun comes up at quarter past six, crosses three glass domes and goes down again, and the room is different every hour of it.

• A full day and night cycle: long bright days, short soft nights, clear skies.

• Sunbeams and moonbeams wake the bottles up. A potion standing in a shaft of light flares from within: brighter, glowing, its particles doubling. Moonlight and sunlight leave an enchantment behind that lingers for a few seconds after the beam has moved on.

• Candlelight, drifting stars, and a moon running through its phases. It never gets pitch dark. This is a shop, not a horror game.

Tidy together. Or don't.

Co-op. Open your shop and read out a six-character room code. That is the whole setup. No account to make, no launcher to sign into, no ports to forward. Your friend types the code and they are standing in your shop, shoving the same heap, stealing bottles out of your hands.

Couch Co-op. One button adds a second player on the same screen, split left and right or top and bottom. Player 2 plays on a controller; keyboard and mouse stay with player 1.

Versus: Sun vs Moon. Split the shop down the middle and race. 13 shelves and 1,040 slots each, two mirrored heaps, your side's bottles only. First to the target, or the highest score when the clock runs out.

• Win on time, on bottle count, or by finishing your whole half.

• A countdown, a scoreboard that races inward from both sides, and a proper winner's card.

Made to be lived in

• 20 licensed tracks. Half the soundtrack starts locked and opens up song by song as you finish shelves, with a music player built into the menu.

• More hands as you go. Start carrying five bottles, work your way up to fifteen.

• Full controller support with in-game rebinding.

• Every potion name, shelf title and symbol is a plain text file. Rename all 260. Retitle the shelves. Translate the shop into your own language. Drop the folder in and switch it on.

Wishlist Alchemess

One room. Two thousand and eighty bottles. Nowhere to be.