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Agh, chemistry, the one high school subject I despised the most out of them all! Damn you, cerealwaterfork!!!!!!!

But would you love it if it was a cute girl teaching you chemistry? 

a very patient, caring and loving cute girl who would cheer for you when you get the practice problems right, and cuddle with you after you finish your homework

Here's my let's play of your game cerealwaterfork!

Overall, really goddamn good. The mapping was good, and the title screen looks nice.  And the puzzle with finding out the correct dosages, and hours stirred and buying the ingredients was first really overwhelming, but ended up really fun in the end, and doable most importantly.  And unlike the other jam entries, the game had no bugs at least to my knowledge, so well done on that end!

Anyway, good job!

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Thanks for playing. I'm glad you had fun! I was inspired by this recent Reuters investigation https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/drugs-fentanyl-supplychain/ 

If you look up the paper I referenced in the credits, you really only need high school chemistry, maybe AP chem at most, to follow the steps from start to finish. It's why that drug has become such a problem today. The paper said following the steps will give you 13.44 grams of the drug with 40% purity, so about 5.3 grams of pure fent. But the lethal dose is 0.002 grams!!! And you can see in the investigation how ridiculously easy it is to get kilograms of the ingredients.

This game showcases the so-called "Gupta method" mentioned in the Reuters investigation--it's so easy you literally only need one pot to cook it (the extraction and recrystalization steps can't be done in a pot, but all you need is your basic chemistry lab equipment + supplies from a high school).

Fun fact: the ingredients in the shop that aren't needed for the puzzle are actually ingredients for the extraction and recrystalization steps, which are required to synthesize the HCl salt of fentanyl from the reaction mixture you get when you finish the puzzle. One of these ingredients is DCM, which is the solvent required in extraction, and the ingredient I noticed you were kinda confused whether to buy or not in your let's play. I omitted these steps from the game partially for brevity, and partially for, uh, legal reasons. (it bears repeating: I already modified the quantity and the stirring durations in the recipe, but you can't be too sure...)

The empty table in the left wing of the starting house was meant to have a separator funnel for the extraction steps, which is why you see there's nothing on it.

Oh lol, first playthough I guessed it was a drug of some kind, what with it being a mysterious white power being redacted… although I assumed it was cocaine instead. I’ll admit Ive never been a chemistry\science guy, and had no idea what the drug in question was. Still very interesting!