▲ Recommended
26 hrs
Clicked with me in a way that Rusty's Retirement did not.
Succeeding requires an actual long-term strategy, something which many of these types of games do not. While it's not The Gnorp Apologue by any stretch of the imagination, you do need to think about what you're building, where to place it, which upgrades to prioritize, when to sacrifice heroes, what you're sacrificing them to get, and how you're going to group and position those heroes so that they're not perpetually eating dirt.
The hero classes are divided into three tiers, with the first tier being single-class, the second being dual-class, and the third requiring three different classes. Each in turn has both a normal and a "rare" variant, most of which are beastmen or monsters, and which tend to function entirely different from their normal counterparts. The base classes are all effectively just damage dealers, but the second and third tier classes are increasingly specialized and feature a number of distinct traits that force you to start considering party composition, and which heroes you want grouped where on the map.
On the topic of the rare variants, I'd also like to say that while there's an element of luck present, most of the RNG has ways to mitigate it, such as rare variants of classes appearing more frequently as a hero's age increases (they don't die of old age, it's just an indication of how long they've been around). You can also combine heroes of the same class to effectively keep their class while increasing their rarity, and while decor and materials require you to grind enemies, about ten hours in, you unlock the ability to auto-summon up to 4 specific enemies with increased drop rates, making the grind far more manageable.
The various "decor" items, that is, structures in your town that aren't houses, are both numerous and varied, and don't all equate to passive stat increases. Some grant new abilities to specific classes of heroes, some act as automatic turrets that require manual reloading on occasion, some can cast offensive or defensive spells within a fixed range when they're off cooldown, some act as targeted buffs that can be tethered to specific heroes, some produce or consume resources, etc. Basically, it doesn't fall into the trap that a lot of these games do where the only upgrades available are some flavor of "number go up," and some of them allow you to take a more active role in the game, if you'd care to.
Minor note, but the ability to one-click shrink the game into an icon is also fantastic, as it makes it easier to set it aside when you need to wait for a while to progress without feeling tempted to constantly poke at it. While most games like this have a feature like that, the ones I've played haven't had it as an always-available button, it's usually buried in a menu somewhere which kind of defeats the purpose.
Solid recommendation, just don't expect a highly engaging and active incremental title like The Gnorp Apologue. This is still ultimately an idler, just one that rewards active participation and strategy, unlike something like Rusty's Retirement where you fall asleep with it up only to wake up the next day with infinite money and nothing left to do.
▼ Not recommended
213 hrs
Great game!
* Currently there is a bug where the game's background goes BLACK.
Desktop TRANSPARENCY is not working
Tried with a new save, changing settings, and even following tips on the official Discord Server;
same issue persists..
Bug experiencing on both Windows 11 and Arch Linux.
> The FIX for the black background only sometimes works for WINDOWS, but so far have not managed to get it to work on LINUX distros at all.
please do share if you have an idea on how to fix this (especially on Linux!)
