UPDATE: I've changed my review to a thumbs up for two reasons. First, the game's "push for progression" mechanic is addictive and I can't stop playing it. And second, many of the critical reviews, mine included, talk about the shortcomings of this game as an "idler". But in fact the game developer never once uses the term "idle" in the game description, but instead clearly refers to this as a pure incremental game. Many of the reviews, both positive and negative, use the term "idler" to refer to this game. And "idler" is the second most common "player-based tag" applied to the game (by players). So I think a lot of people seeing this game for the first time are assuming it is intended to be an idler game (as I did), when in fact it is clearly intended to be an active incremental game. Imagine that one thousand players simply decided to tag this game as a "first person shooter", despite the developer's own description stating otherwise, it would make little sense for me to give it a thumbs down because it is a poor FPS. I believe my original review did something similar, emphasizing how this game really doesn't hold up as an "idler". As an "active incremental", however, this game and the developer's work deserves a thumbs up. original review I'm really torn by this one. It scratches the push-for-progression itch, but there are a lot of blockers to this being "fun". I'll try to explain: Technically, this can be called an idle game, but the game mechanics really stretch the meaning of "idle". In the game, you are trying to make it through 11 "chapters", each of which has an increasing number of "tasks" within it. (Chapter 1 has 24 tasks, chapter 2 has 36 tasks, chapter 3 has 41 tasks, etc.) Each task takes an amount of time which is determined by your stats in a related skill. (For example, you "cook crabs" faster if your "cooking" skill stat is higher, etc.) The longer (or more often) you do a task, the (slightly) higher your corresponding skill stat becomes. BUT THESE TASKS ARE NOT AUTOMATED until you've completed them a certain number of times. And since most tasks appear only once in its specifically assigned chapter, it means you'll need to replay the chapter several times to automate that one task. And the tasks are essentially sequential, so you'll need to complete the first one to be able to do the second one (although there are a few "forked" tasks which offer a choice, like "fight vs. flee", but these forks always converge again after a task or two.) So you manually start the task and wait for it to complete. Maybe you'll wait 1 to 5 minutes. Once that task is complete, THE GAME STOPS until you manually trigger the next task. At its core, this game is about getting those tasks automated, so that you don't have to manually start them and wait for them to complete. This game is basically a very very long list of nearly identical tasks which you are striving to automate. As you play and replay and replay the chapter, your list of automated tasks grows. But the game will always STOP when it runs into an unautomated task. So, the game may in fact "idle" for a while, but it can only idle for a very short while. I'm talking about MINUTES, not hours. For example, according to Steam, I have about 230 hours of playtime in this game. During that time, I have played actively, pushing it along several times each day, and have automated 109 tasks. This means the game will "idle" through those 109 tasks without my intervention. But in game time, ALL of these 109 tasks, when automated, complete in just under 21 minutes. Just to clarify: After 230 hours of game play, this game now idles for only 21 minutes. Then it STOPS. So I then have to manually push it along to the next task I am trying to automate, wait for that task to end, move on to the next, etc. To give you an idea of how often this game stops, the game itself (in game settings) considers only non-stopped time as "timed played". And according to the game, I have a "total time played" of a little over 56 hours. In other words, the game has only played 56 hours out of the 230 hours I've had it actively running . The game was stopped (not IDLE!) for those other 174 hours, despite my checking it several times every day to push it along. The game's Steam store page states is has "220 hours of unpaused content". Unpaused, of course, means non-stopped. At my current rate, this means approx 920 hours of (Steam) playtime to reach 220 hours of (game) unpaused time. I have played many other idle games for far longer than 920 hours, so that duration isn't a problem. What IS a problem is that for 700 of those 920 hours this game will be stopped/paused. And this is why the game, although technically an idle game, is not really an idle game. And just one final observation/complaint I need to mention. While you are doing all of the above, your "adventurer" has a health bar, which slowly depletes. Your max health is slightly incremented each time you die (when health reaches zero) and you "reincarnate" (back to the start of chapter one, task one). Your health depletion can be mitigated through certain tasks (like eating food or building shelter), but in essence, the rate of your "health decay" increases slightly each second, making your lifespan amazingly short. This means your main effort of getting through the immediate sequence of tasks (to get them automated!) is severely curtailed by the increasing speed at which your health is dropping to zero. The primary way to alleviate your encroaching death is to eat food (which you've either gathered or cooked in a previous task). So even early on, your inventory will contain a vast array of edibles which you must continuously shove into your face simply to survive for a few more seconds. I know this is just a numbers game, so on the one hand, "who cares?". But after a while you cannot help but realize that this game is ultimately about an out-of-control metabolism which becomes so ravenous that you must eat anything and everything you can get your hands on -- dogs, cats, children -- just to have enough energy to walk a half mile down the street. The game's depiction of your adventurer quickly becomes absurd. You will literally die from metabolic exhaustion (again and again and again and again) as you simply walk down the street or talk to some dude. Alternative names for the game could seriously include: "Metabolic Apocalypse" or "Ozempic Half-life". (I'm not kidding about eating cooked camels every 4 seconds just to stay alive long enough to pick another banana, which of course will also immediately go in your pie-hole if you don't die before it gets there.) I opted for a thumb-down because this cost money and now appears to be abandoned or in limbo. (The game has been untouched with no developer updates for 18 months or so.) If the store page's description of what this game was intended to include is correct, its means the current content is less than half of what was envisioned. But if chapters 12 through 25 ever materialize, my (uneducated) guess is that they will contain more of the same and will simply increase the list of similar sequential tasks. If the pause mechanic was not so prevalent and the idle duration was actually meaningful (rather than a hindrance) I would easily give this a thumbs-up despite its cost and being in limbo.
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