Got my forklift trapped and Alt F4ed out of the game. Remembered that I could buy another forklift, only to boot the game back up and be put in jail for 12 hours. I also realized I would have had to wait for 4/5 days of daily wages anyways to be able to afford a new forklift. I was almost getting into a flow with it, logging in periodically while I was working from home in real life. But I was excited at the thought of me softlocking the game, so I took that as a sign that I shouldn't play this.

This is where the story would have ended had I not continued playing the game to completion after this. I waited the 5 days to get my forklift unstuck and continued, with the strong desire to see where this game went, and I'm glad I did.

The music grew on me. I like how it changes depending on time of day. The dystopic capitalist town also grew on me over time. I enjoyed coming back to it every day, to steal more time crystals. There was a nice sense of community and solidarity with the few characters you interact with. Though, sometimes people would just call you and talk a novel at you about this or that. I ended up skipping most of these towards the end. I generally understood what they were trying to say. The kinda rough Unity-looking artstyle grew on me, too. It felt as detailed as it needed to be given the drab tone of the whole town.

I wasn't sure about the slow sokoban gameplay at first, but it's a nice change of pace to think about the puzzles 2 3 steps ahead because of the pace in which you solve them. Also, it probably helped that they weren't too challenging.

I had actually took my gaming laptop with me to my parents for the holidays and played off my Steam Cloud save to continue to log in at least once a day. When I got back home, the saves somehow duplicated a forklift and trash compactor, so I got 2 extras for free. I felt like I cheated the system to benefit the greater good. Though, the same day I discovered this glitch, I got crushed by a mine cart and got sent to the hospital with a big medical bill, so I guess it all equalizes in the end.

There was a part of the game where you have to push these mine carts to a finish line. I couldn't figure out how to do this until the last cart. Before then, I somehow glitched the mine carts into the finish line, which I take as a win.

I do really vibe with the overall anti-capitalist message, though. It is quite well designed around the mundanity of work and the slow but inevitable progress of change. It was not always fun to play this game, but overall I quite enjoyed it. It did help that there were some light stealth mechanics, which I'm a sucker for.

I await the sequel.

it's something to have a game warp how you live your life momentarily. i played this for a month during my own working days: just launching up the game and setting the my machines in motion at the start of the day and during lunch and once i'm done with work for the day (and sometimes during working hours too haha). it's a neat meditation on how time is continually taken from us and the efforts we must go through to take wrest control of our time back. also the time gated progression provides a unique motivation for figuring out optimal sokoban solutions which is super neat.