Cauldron

Ye This game is crazy its addicting like a drug yall need to watch the vids that olexa uploaded hes the best indie plug out there for sure

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this game. Its not a masterpiece, but its a very good game that you can tell whoever developed it put a lot of love and effort into making it. The game pacing feels correct, and the gameplay loop is quite fun and adds just enough variety to keep you entertained through the upgrade trees. Combine this with a turn-based RPG combat system with a variety of builds, you can tell that the developer cared a lot about making people be able to play however they want.

That being said, I do have some criticisms for this game. There were definitely some standout parts that just didn't feel fun or well thought out at certain points.

1. This one is really simple, but I think there should be a toggle for the "phasing" you do for objects to get rid of screen clutter. I appreciate that you just phase irrelevant things by default so the player can focus, but some of us were born to thrive in that type of chaos and want to see everything.

2. Fishing game needs some QoL for later into the game. Compared to the other minigames, its really hard to drastically inflate your scores later and loses a lot of its fun by taking half an hour of going up and down each time. I really think you need an upgrade that fast-tracks you to certain depths or to rework the pricing on upgrades that already do.

3. The Apple Minigame needs a control rework for keyboard. Action Key+Arrow Key in what essentially turns into a bullet hell with a conflicting keybind for dashing makes that control scheme just not work. I would much more prefer double tap the up or down key, or just using Q and E or something else.

4. The Ice Minigame needs a bit of early love. I got so bored with it that I got to 30 pieces of ice and said screw this and just waited for AFK gains to pile up and then go back and upgrade the crap out of everything, which made it feel way better.

5. Resistances should be reworked. It feels very lame that you can't run your favorite characters because you are against a squad of enemies that are just immune to that damage type. I ended up never touching any of the characters that specialize in elemental types because of that, it was just way easier to pump up Nyxs Special and spam it, knowing that 3 out of 4 statuses will effect them. I think that enemies that are themed towards an element shouldn't be immune, just highly resistant. Or maybe only a few types of those enemies should be resistant. (btw, not including the immune slimes in this, as I feel that they are acceptable and have a clear purpose)

6. The Fishing Spirit Minigame (not the villagers, the other one) just.....isn't fun. I couldn't get myself to even bother with it at all cause it was just that unenjoyable to me. I feel like a variant of this should be given for each minigame type, rather than just fishing, but you can only use one of them to gain spirit or something like that. It felt kinda sad that I just got locked out of infinite spirit just because I really really disliked that minigame.

That being said, all of these points above are more me nitpicking. This game is still quite good, even with these issues. I just know how I felt on some of them (especially the last one), and feel that there was likely people in the same boat as me that could enjoy the game even more than they already do with a couple fairly quick and minor fixes.

It's not bad, really, but it's just so padded that it becomes a bore. Around a third of the way through you unlock the ability to automate the minigames and the rpg battles, and because of that, it just becomes a game you look at as it plays itself. By the end you're going to be pressing auto buy upgrades, auto create party, auto assign skills, you'll watch a minigame play itself for a couple minutes, then run through 20 or so auto battles till you fail and have to repeat.

Sure, I did spend the effort to complete the game, but it felt out of obligation more than anything. And the "truth" of the whole story is very much not worth it. The start was interesting and engaging, but it just gets so banal by the end.