Idle Spiral

Got stoned and stared at the circle for an hour strait 돌에 취해 한 시간 동안 해협을 응시함. Junji Ito would approve Junji Ito 승인 한 겜.

I want to like this game. The spirals are cool. I like math idlers. I like incrementals where you add automation and hit a prestige mechanic that means the last (x) hours grinding for something pass again in mere minutes. The problem is, I just didn't like it. I gave it a good crack, i think. I unlocked all the mechanics and kept waiting for that time when new mechanics made earlier ones simple, but it didn't really happen. Some new unlocks even make older challenges punishingly hard. Instead of the usual "Number Gets Bigger = yay", it seems the devs here are keen to keep number low and make it progressively harder, with increasingly small rewards. Grinding away slowly at stats in one minigame, based on RNG rewards and requiring regular attention to re-optimise, to enable progression in the main game and other minigames, seems like lazy gating and is simply not fun. It isn't that this mechanic is one way to gain stats amongst many... it basically _becomes_ the game, as you need to prioritise it or you get nowhere. Significantly reducing the "Difficulty" scaling factor would help keep it idle, as well as reducing the RNG on the rewards significantly so you're not wasting so much time "killing enemies" that drop +1 to a stat you have millions of. It feels like the dev(s) have been playing too many bad MMORPG's and are just keen on getting their revenge making people grind. The first 5 or so main prestige levels (T-5 in game) are interesting, popping new mechanics and new challenges. But there appears to be a huge wall around T-8 to T-12 or so which just isn't fun. A bunch of the challenges you unlock around there are essentially not doable until you are T-20+ which just makes no sense from a progression point of view as they don't help progression. And then everything is walled behind the aforementioned grindy "battle" mechanic so your progress stalls until you spend a few weeks dedicated to that. Give it a crack if you want, and ymmv, but I think for me this one is going in the bin until it gets a revamp.

There's a moderately intricate idle/incremental in here. However, I cannot recommend it because the game communicates itself so incredibly poorly. This comes in a few layers. There's a lot of sloppy and overlapping terminology. There are at least 3 different prestige types, all of which are called "prestige" and sometimes in game text refers to enabling/disabling/ no effect from "prestige" without saying which one they mean. They don't mean all of them. There is a "battle" mechanic, where you "fight" spirals. There are rewards for killing particular counts of enemies in different parts of the interface. But do these counts care about killing specific types, or any type? It's not stated and it's not clear. There are many more things like this. The game commits the common sin in the sub-genre of mathy incrementals of thinking that a bunch of formulas means nothing needs to be explained. As usual for the style, the formulae aren't even complete., for example you have some sort of Sigma summation notation without defining what is being selected from to sum. The player can in some cases guess, and they might be right, but that's no substitute for clear information. Sometimes you can buy bonuses to letters without any idea where the letter exist or what it does. Sometimes it's visible in the list of formulas. Sometimes it's not. Again, information about "what this variable does" in for example a tooltip would make this mostly work. Or possibly a search or highlight function. But that is absent here. Sometimes I think you can buy a variable when it's currently disabled (or at least not shown in any way). I think this has to do with challenges but I haven't tracked it down, but it certainly adds to the confusion. The actual UI itself is really poor at communicating. Sometimes there are tables of boxes with numbers in them. It looks like pure information, but you can can click on the boxes to spend something which is totally unclear. Sometimes the row and column headers contain text does not describe the row or column, but looks like it does. Sometimes you're spending resources that you can't even see in that screen. The ability to even access some of the information relies on very weird non-standard toggles that cause floating panes to cover parts of the display. At best it's a mild nuisance, but it can mean the player never even discovers the information exists at all. These are just the main themes. The overall stack of problems makes this less of a puzzle experience, and more of a morass. And that doesn't get into the full-screen-only and resource-hungry nature of the application, both of which are poor choices for an idle game. Oh, and you can't actually get real offline progress. Some parts do work offline, and some don't. So you get the impression offline works until you realize you're missing out on enough bonuses that your progress is sort of fake. In short, this needs a lot of cleanup to be good at what it's trying to do.