Recent reviews by fantismalspider

Six hours in, and I've had the game paused for half an hour now as I optimize my potion recipes and open a Google Sheet so I can figure out just how my ingredients are being used, and maybe I'll also make a diagram so I can see the flow of my workers to optimize their movements so I can stop hiring new hands and just use my existing ones more efficiently, and oh my god, I've become a CEO in a capitalist society, my shop isn't even doing bad!

10/10, this tycoon game absolutely captures that management feeling, and if you're the sort of person who gets excited about making your own supplemental spreadsheets for games (I know you're out there, because I'm one of them...), you'll love this game.

(And if you're not one of those people, you'll probably be fine, because like I said, my shop is doing great without it. I just realized it could do even better if I actually organized myself!)

However, that being said, if you're one of those people, you'll also probably be incredibly frustrated with this game. While it has all of the mechanics there, the tools are sorely lacking. How do I see which machines are processing which ingredients and reorganize them so they all have a fairly even workload? Well, I can open each machine to see what is assigned to it, but I can't move something to a different machine of my choice from there. No, I have to go to the cooker to open each individual potion that uses the ingredient I want to move and make sure that those processes are moved individually to the machine I want.

Which employees are ready for promotion? Scroll through your entire list until you notice one with a green arrow. No way to sort based on that. (Bolo is supreme and will always be promoted immediately, because otherwise I fear she may be a spy to bring down my floating city...)

If I assign my employees to specific machines, I don't have an easy way to check and see if every machine is covered, or if I've left an employee idle. I can't tell employees to prioritize their main task but to do delivery tasks if they have nothing else to do.

If I want to optimize my recipes to use as many overlapping ingredients as possible, I can't make a new version of an existing recipe and replace it without being IN that recipe to begin with, which makes it really hard when I want to use a different recipe as the base. I also can't see at a glance if a tweak I make to a recipe actually improves it or not unless I memorize what the old values were.

There's a lot to love here, and I'm going to continue playing this in a couple hours after I figure out my spreadsheet and flow diagrams, and it was impressive enough that I actually stopped and wrote a review. If you like management-heavy games with a lot of thought needed, definitely give this one a try. I look forward to continued improvements in how the information is provided, because that's really my only complaint right now!

So boring. I thought I'd get into it, but nope, it's like all the most boring parts of the Sims made a bit clunkier and uglier. Everything is ugly, nothing seems to work together, either mechanically or aesthetically, and I am always acutely aware that I am "playing" a "game" and not actually becoming immersed in anything. So, uh... yeah. Don't bother.

This game is so much fun. When you have even one other human to play it with, it is a comedy of errors as you try to manipulate your ship (which steers like a cow at the best of times, and a rock most of the time) into the depths of the Living Infinite, discovering all sorts of crazy new weapons and costumes along the way.

When you have even one other human.

It SAYS it's playable single player, but that's absolutely laughable. You can fill your submarine with a crew of bots that will nominally do things like slam their weakest wrenches against the holes in your ship or fire at every small enemy on your screen (even if it's something you SHOULDN'T BE FIRING AT, like the totem that will spawn a ghost if you shoot at it but is perfectly safe if you steam gently past it)... but they won't help you if you want a turn on the shooty shooty guns and want someone else to steer your yellow submarine. Nor will they help you bust through walls in your caving adventures if you happened to be holding an item that does not damage walls (like the chemistry set).

So join a public online game, right? The games list is full of them!

Except no. Most of those games are "zombie lobbies" that have already ended long ago, so you'll spend about three hours trying to find one game, ANY game, that doesn't "Fail to connect." And when you finally DO hit that jackpot of a game that works, you'd better bring a wrench because you will inevitably replace the last bot that had a repair tool and your ship is about to sink. Except then you don't get to play with the fun weapons, because if you don't bring a wrench, your ship explodes and you have to go back to the lobby.

I suppose you could join the discord to try to find people to play with, but good luck there too. There are no instructions for new people on what to do or where to go to find a crew.

This is an incredible game. I love the art style and the concept. I LOVE the music. Everyone SHOULD play it. Too bad no one will bother, because it's impossible to play if you don't already know people playing it.