Terraformental

Fell in love with the game immediately. It's a lot like Increlution, but unlike in that game, you simply cannot do *everything* each time. You have to choose. You actually have to read what's going on to understand where to go, it's not just "do everything there is in an area, proceed to next area, repeat". The solution isn't always straight-forward (though it's also not that complex either), but more intuitive.

I dunno, I completely recommend this game to whoever is into text-based idlers.

Though I have to say, it's not exactly an idler like "leave the game open for a day" or something. It's more like a text-based adventure with idler elements. I dunno, it's awesome, don't wanna give too much away cause spoilers.

OH and the setting? I've always wondered why so many people go into the over-saturated "magical" style, and none of them made something sci-fi. Well, here it is. You literally start on another planet.

I got it fullprice, and I personally don't feel like I wasted my money. But remember, it's text-based, don't expect any graphics apart from like 10 icons or something.

This game is legit.

Though it's billed as an incremental game, Terraformental is much closer in spirit to a classic text adventure game. The only graphics are a UI indicating your status and actions, a simple map, and a PDA for notes, and almost all of the information about the game world is delivered through text narration. Your goal is to navigate the world, solve puzzles, manage resources, and solve the mystery of why you seem to be the only person left alive on a half-terraformed alien planet - and why you are stuck in a time loop to boot.

The world is nonlinear, and in its structure and design it actually reminds me a lot of a Metroidvania or Soulslike. You move from facility to facility, investigating their unique features, scavenging for supplies, and searching for answers. Some facilities are more or less derelict, and each of them has their own unique set of flavor, puzzles, and problems for you to overcome. Some problems require resources, tools, or abilities from other facilities to solve, and all of them are interconnected in various ways that keep traversal fresh and interesting.

The game is chock full of shortcuts, alternate paths, and unlocks. Since you're in a time loop, and everything physical resets at the beginning of each loop, your greatest weapon is knowledge - and this is also how Terraformental keeps you pushing forward despite starting at the same place every loop. Unlike some incremental games where your individual actions attain ludicrously blazing speeds on an exponential scale, Terraformental is more reserved: each time you perform an action does make it faster as you grow more familiar with it, and these speed bonuses really do add to your efficiency, but the game is not designed around you simply beating your head against an action until you can finally do it so fast you can brute force a puzzle. Most actions won't ever get more than two or three times as fast, even after dozens or hundreds of repetitions.

Rather, you progress faster by learning more, as your knowledge is the only thing that loops with you. Hack a security door one loop, and though you may run out of air with your hand on the door handle, next loop you can waltz right in with the code already in mind. Spend one loop scouting an alternate route between facilities so that next loop you can cross the distance in half the time. Drink your last bottle of water while downloading all the data in a computer, and next loop you don't need to bother with it. In doing this, each thing you learn incrementally (heh) pushes you a little further and makes you a little more efficient. As well, certain collections of actions will, if performed together enough, eventually be collapsed into individual actions, and this is represented diegetically: rather than having to concentrate on each individual action to, for example, repair your rover vehicle, the game eventually says "you've done this so many times you can do it in your sleep" and collapses it to a single button press.

Solving puzzles is complicated by resource management, but unlike most games that track your vitals (where you just have to push a button every once in a while), this resource management is an integral part of the game. Time is your enemy, and you are always working against several clocks: food, water, air, power, weather, and even more esoteric deadlines. Your remaining resources determine how far you can go and how much you can get done before you die, and every loop is a balance between acquiring those resources and advancing your goals. Depending on your goal, sometimes the investment into retrieving a cache of supplies is not worth the supplies themselves, and so your actions must be purposeful and efficient. The game isn't extremely punishing - and after all, if you die, you can always just start a new loop - but I found it to be just the right level of challenge and mental investment, requiring me to think critically and plan ahead to succeed.

Terraformental impresses me in many ways. It is well written (a rarity in games), the game world is tightly designed, the facilities and their puzzles are interesting and satisfying to solve, and the game does a good job of deflecting the expected tedium of doing the same actions every loop. It's good enough that I'm violating my normal "don't play Early Access games until they're done" policy and will be eagerly following its development cycle.

(Also, demo progress carries over seamlessly into the retail game, so there's nothing lost in trying it out.)

Edit: I should preface by saying I disagree with the negative critiques conclusion, but I understand their frustration. This is an issue of balancing effort to reward, and making sure repetitive actions don't become too repetitive - or further ways to simplify them.

I actually disagree with the negative review about time-wasting, and I'd like to give the developer an alternative perspective. I personally hate time-wasting in games. It annoys me to ♥♥♥♥ that developers pad a 20 hour experience with 20 hours of worthless content for a 40 hour slog. Worse are the games that intentionally make mechanics worse to make you spend more time on them. I absoltely hate getting my time wasted and have left scathing reviews for that before. That said, I separate time-wasting as meaningless time spent. Something that adds nothing to the experience, or takes away from it. Games like this that use part-idle mechanics have an important reason to waste your time. It gives weight to your success. Progress is meant to be taken step by step, and the time spent is part of the meaningful progression. This is why some people love Runescape, and others absolutely hate it. When you remove the time component of the game it begins to fall apart, because it was central to its experience. This is why people hate modern Runescape. Hell, the devs have done a complete 180 to try and recover their game.

Some people won't like the time element to the game, but I do think it's integral to the experience. Especially for a game like this where the story is centered around learning, adapting, and struggling to overcome obstacles. Each loop things are a bit easier, you're a bit more knowledgeable, you can go a bit farther. The game reacts to your progress and re-orientates your actions. The struggle part of that is directly tied to the feeling of progress. The time invested makes the outcomes meaningful. If it took 1 second to do every action none of it would feel meaningful. It would minimise the accomplishment of making it to the next facility, or discovering another piece of the puzzle. The only thing left to enjoy would be the story.

So that's my take. Though I don't see anything wrong with offering options to relatively speed up the game like Magic Research etc. does. Loving the game so far, and looking forward to more.