Recent reviews by KScorp

It's a stylish game with good music, but most other things in the game kind of fell flat for me.

The game tries to connect with you emotionally with a story that it paints as something epic (literally bringing about the end of an immortal world), but it does nothing to nurture those emotions. I didn't care about any of the characters, since you don't interact with a single one for any significant amount of time. I understood how the game *wanted* me to feel, but it didn't put in the work, so it ended up as something that looked nice but felt empty.

The battles were also more frustrating than fun. Tests of endurance, memory, and reaction speed. It's a bullet hell style game where you have very little time to react to the bullets. This is made even more frustrating when you gain the ability to shoot bullets back. Bullets you shoot back can get blocked by enemy bullets, which means often you shoot a bullet and then an enemy bullet unpredictably appears and blocks it after you've already shot it. It wouldn't be so bad if shooting your own bullets was easy, but shooting back is a whole process of first absorbing one of their bullets, absorbing a second bullet of the same color without getting hit (but you can't absorb a second bullet too quickly), and then finally you're allowed to shoot back one bullet. Feels great when it takes 5 seconds to shoot a single bullet, but then when you finally shoot it the enemy spawns a bullet which blocks it right before it reaches them. It feels like the game is purposefully frustrating in this regard, urging you to push past the frustration to beat it. It didn't work for me.

The choice of having invisible walls nearly everywhere in the overworld with only some floor tiles visible to hint where you can walk is yet another place where style is prioritized over functionality. Looks nice, plays poorly. Frequently ran into the corners of invisible walls, and you can't dash diagonally or change directions while dashing. So even something as simple as moving around in the world adds to the frustration.

Short and sweet. I found most puzzles to be on the easy side, although there are a handful of parts that require some thought.

Fun game. Play as a guardsman reminiscent of Papers Please without the looming threat of your family dying. Much more lighthearted, doesn't take itself too seriously, and has high quality voice acting, writing, and art.

The biggest complaint I have is that, as a completionist who wants to get the highest score possible on every level, the game puts up some really annoying barriers that drag the experience down. Although the game features a rewind mechanic, its use is limited, and if you run out, you have to replay the entire level, not just the part you are on. So you must spend a few minutes clicking through all the same dialogue making all the same choices just to get back to where you were.

That wouldn't be much of a problem if it wasn't for my second complaint: some of the levels don't have intuitive ways of maxing out their score. Most of them do, even if the game kind of does a *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge* at you to get you to pick them, but some of them do require plain lucky guesses of what to do. So you will eventually have to use the rewind if you intend to get maximum scores.

The majority of them are fine though, and figuring out the ideal solution without brute forcing does feel good.

Beat it in 16 hours of active time, around ~6 days of offline time. Game does a lot of things right: offline time converts to active time at a 1:1 ratio, UI is pretty good even if it's a bit complex, and for the couple hours I played a day there was always something to do and not much waiting, as I played almost always at 10x speed thanks to saved up offline time.

There is a fundamental problem I have though, which some people might want a warning for and comes close to making me not recommend the game: there are very few interesting decisions to make in this game. The entire gameplay loop is: find the thing you need the most, then find ways to make more of it. Most often this will be simply by building more of the thing that makes it, sometimes it will be by spending upgrade points to improve the building that makes it. And that's basically it. Do that until you beat the game.

Admittedly, sometimes the "chain" of finding things you need goes quite deep. You need more enchanted wood? Make more buildings that make it. Oh, now you're missing the mana you need for it? Make more buildings that generate mana. Oh, now you're missing mana crystals to make mana? Create more crystal harvesters. Oh, now you're running out of raw mana crystals to harvest? Make more prospectors for them. Still not enough? Respec your town bonus points to make prospecting much faster.

There are never any new mechanics. There are never fundamental changes to how you build your towns. You found 8 different towns over the course of the game, each in different biomes, but their differences are so minor that you can build each town mostly the same way.

So overall, I enjoyed it, and the execution is very good, but it is also very easy, with few interesting decisions to make. The biggest "difficulty" is probably just identifying what thing you need the most of, and even then you can probably just build more of everything and come out alright at the end. It's a game that focuses much more on optimizing what you can do, but a sub-optimal setup will still perform quite well. So if that's what you want, then it's the perfect game for you! It just wasn't the perfect game for me.

Beat it in 7 hours. Short and cute game, No click spam required, which is great. The talent tree is big enough to be interesting and small enough to not be overwhelming. Honestly can't think of anything the game does wrong. Just be wary of the game length, this is not a long or heavy game like so many others in the genre.

I will say though that although this is labeled as a "clicker" and "idler", there isn't actually that much clicking or idling that needs to be done. In fact, I'd say that idling a significant amount of time will not usually get you that much further. If there are no significant upgrades you can buy in the next 10 minutes it's probably best to prestige with a new strategy. It's not just the talents that are important, what you spend your Zybe on is equally critical. So I'd say that this is a strategy game first, and a clicker/idler second.

One of the best precision platformers ever created.

Edit: Patch 1.0.2 seems to have added a rotating backup system, which makes losing more than a puzzle or two worth of progress very unlikely, albeit you'd have to recover manually. This is good enough in my eyes, so I'll change my review to positive for the time being. I'll update my review properly when I complete the game.

Old review for context:

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My PC crashed while playing and my save is gone. The game doesn't make backups. The bad save was also uploaded to steam cloud.

It's really unacceptable for a game released in 2023 to not know how to save a game properly. Complete save data loss shouldn't be happening in situations like this.

The game was quite good, but all the momentum I had is now gone. It's gonna take hours to get back to where I was, retreading content I already did.

This is a brilliant puzzle game. It manages to combine stories and puzzles very intimately and naturally. I've completed all the main puzzles, and can say that each and every one felt fair. There were no obtuse puzzles, even for the stories that ended up with contrived plots.

The game still feels a bit short, despite the recent update. I think part of it is because some of the chapters felt a bit too easy, so their 4-5 stories went by in a flash. There were some meaty chapters that needed decent think time, namely the chapters featuring the Queen, but even the "medium" difficulty chapters didn't take too long to figure out. Difficulty varies a bit, some of the late game chapters were much easier than chapters before them.

I haven't done much with the recently added stamps, since its kind of annoying to go back and forth between the stamps and the puzzles to figure out what you need to do, and they give off a feel of being optional side content.

I strongly recommend the game to anyone who likes puzzle games, with the caveat of the short length of the game. Paid $10 for this during a sale, and although I don't regret it, it does feel steep for the amount of content in the game. It needs a few more difficult chapters.

It's a fairly good language deciphering game. It's not particularly challenging, there are only a few parts that might stump you if you try to solve them too early, but it also wasn't so easy as to be boring.

The game has a few off-genre sections (namely the stealth sections) which aren't too difficult and also feel like solving a puzzle, so they weren't really out of place and served as a nice change of pace. They're also pretty generous with the checkpoints, so if you get caught near the end of a long room you won't have to redo the whole thing.

The worst part is the rather slow movement, which isn't a problem when you're progressing forward, but is very noticeable when you start backtracking. I would have appreciated a faster movement option in rooms you've already solved, such as double clicking an accessible door to immediately travel to it without having to walk to it.

Story is simple, but quite good despite that. I enjoyed the true ending.

This is a neat little incremental/idle game. It's not perfect. The interface has some issues that make setting up your loops (the main part of the game) annoying sometimes. Making large changes to the middle of your loop is particularly annoying. And exploring the map, which is very important, takes way more effort than it should.

However, the core gameplay loop is fun and surprisingly well paced and balanced. There were no massive time walls, every goal I had I could complete with a few hours of idling, as long as I set up a decent loop. New things to do appeared at a reasonable rate, and all the content felt interesting. There were several nice mechanics which required re-thinking how you structure your loop, and optimizing for different things. And it never felt like it was too easy or too hard.

And, it actually has an ending! So many idle games are just "make number go higher" ad infinitum, but this game has a conclusion, and it is satisfying. I appreciate that.