Orb of Creation

The early access version of this game that won Best Incremental Browser Game of 2021 is substantially more fun than the 1.0 release. As of the time of writing, you can play the early access version (0.5.4) for free on itch or by right clicking the game in your library > Properties > Game Versions & Betas > select v0.5. I do not recommend purchasing the 1.0 release for the current price ($12 USD).

The changes between the early access version and the 1.0 release are focused on slowing down the player's rate of progression and removing the number of tools that the player can use to solve problems. In order to try to force each run to feel unique (something which I am doubtful was achieved), the developer greatly reduced the amount of content that can be accessed in a single playthrough of the game. These changes are in service to a prestige system that most casual players will never interface with, either because one 40 hour run was enough or because they already dropped the game out of frustration.

Detrimental changes:

- Almost all of your spells, glyphs, artifacts, alchemy recipes, and rituals are randomly drawn from a pool. The number of times you can draw from this pool is small and you will not be able to get everything on a single run, limiting the number of tools available to you. For example: you cannot rely on using alchemy to ameliorate a poor wood production, as you may never roll the alchemical recipe to transmute wood.

- Attributes now take roughly 2 seconds to develop after clicking. In a game in which the primary action you take is purchasing attributes (the achievement for purchasing 100,000 attributes is one of the most commonly completed), this adds up to a substantial and unnecessary slowdown.

- Researches now require advancement points, which are awarded every few hundred attributes purchased. You will not be able to get the majority of researches on a first playthrough, as opposed to the early access version in which you could develop all of them with enough time. There is no ability to reset and reinvest your advancement points, meaning that the only solutions to a poor distribution of researches are to power through a slowdown of 10+ hours or to restart your save. A first run of this game will take 30-40 hours if you interrogate every tooltip-within-tooltip for hidden mechanics, 40-50 hours for the casual player, and 50+ hours if you invest your advancement points in researches that look fun rather than researches that strictly help you alleviate production chokepoints.

- You can no longer set the levels of your spells (which determines their costs) individually. Rather, there is a single global variable that determines the level of all spells on all loadouts. I found myself constantly navigating back to the wizardry screen to fiddle with the global output level, as I needed to adjust it nearly every time I switched loadouts and sometimes even between different spells on the same loadout. In a similar vein, druidry and alchemy also have a single variable that determines their costs and outputs. I found myself adjusting the druidry output level every time I had to switch types of plants that I was harvesting.

- Progression is gated behind a new mechanic called agromancy, which requires real life time waiting for plants to grow. Unless you heavily invest your very limited advancement points into druidry, you will often find your chokepoint to be waiting for plants.

- Crafting is no longer instantaneous, and there is a heavy penalty for crafting large quantities at once. This incentivizes a playstyle of clicking the crafting buttons once every 15 seconds, waiting, and doing it again to avoid the bulk crafting penalty.

- Alchemy has been cut down, with the number of recipes you can have active at once greatly reduced. Instead of long, carefully-balanced production chains of resources, now you can typically only bulk-produce one or two resources at a time. As you progress, nearly every alchemy-exclusive resource is moved to an aura attribute that produces it without the need for alchemy at all.

- Individual researches rarely feel like substantial power boosts, though they can be powerful in aggregate. In the early-access version, each research gave you immediate access to new tools and mechanics.

- The prestige system does not feel rewarding. My first prestige run was about 25% more powerful than my first run, which was noticeable but not exciting. You can expect to earn roughly 6 of the game's 50 achievements on a first run. Each prestige run beyond that point will earn another 2-3.

- This may be a matter of personal preference, but I find the 1.0 version to have a worse ui layout than the early access version.

Overall, an extremely disappointing experience with the 1.0 version from someone who loved the early access version.

As a newcomer, I find this game quite opaque and confusing, a lot of it due to the multi-level nested menu design reusing the same screen space, and thus the game is taking a long time to present what it is, what its hooks are, and whether those hooks will appeal to me. I'm probably only starting to grasp the intended gameplay loop and how to navigate everything, if even that, but I've decided that I've spent enough time on this and found no interesting promise.

Pressing [T] to read tooltips works fine and I'm assuming the content is probably all interconnected and technically provide sufficient information. Maybe you're meant to discover things slowly by yourself aided by this. This could be a great design in lieu of a handholdy tutorial.

But given what I've discovered so far, while I can see all these different ways to make numbers go up, I see little purpose or meaning to them. As far as I can tell, it's all just to unlock the next new thing, the next slightly distinct growth function with new descriptions attached possibly intended as worldbuilding flavor text. It's normal for incremental games to start you clueless, and then gradually give you more options and clearer or more enticing directions, but I do not feel any direction here, apart from figuring out roughly how this new option works, and then try to unlock the next one blindly, hoping there's something mathematically interesting to play with.

Maybe that IS the intended direction, but it's still not a strong enough hook for me, especially since the game is very involved and not idle at all if you want to progress efficiently.

It feels like all of this, or at least the current version 1.0 of the game, was largely made by and for people who already understand this rhythm and wants to enjoy more of it, but unfortunately I'm not one of them.

This is not an idle clicker.
This is not an incremental game.
This is the distillation of the factorio, the satisfactory and the dyson sphere dopamine drips, embedded in the lore of Master of Magic.
I am not sure whether by accident or by design, but the designer of this game stumbled (devised) THE best, abstract, resource/production chain management game up to now.

Read on if you need the rationale.

The game is not an idler. I bought it on version 0.5.x so I don't know how it was before. But it is not an idler because you can't play it without thinking. There are intertwined systems within systems of production, resources and upgrades, distilled out of spatial trappings (where to put factories-where to store the stuff) and you need to have your mind there if you want to meanigfully progress.
The game has such a great emergent lore "flavour" that it really puts you in the shoes of a disembodied sorcerer who is again coming to the world and shaping it. In fact this game reminded me already of the diverse spellcasting of Master of Magic. If the developer adds (or has already? I don't know) armies, minions, cities and summons then I can definitely choose this over MoM2.

I bought this game for about 3-4 euros with a "meh, let's try it" attitude.
The developer is doing themselves a disservice! If they classified, correctly, their game as resource production, management game they could legitimately charge 10-12 euros for it. The fact that you have numbers going up is irrelevant. Numbers go up also in the storage containers of Satisfactory.

This is simply, the best distilled, resource and production chain management game in steam now.
The developer needs to understand that and the fact that they can play in the major league with features like those in Cultist simulator. The days of the itch.io feature list must end.

This game is moving towards Slay the Spire territory.