Cult of the Yellow King

An incremental game that doesn't really do incrementing, a clicker that doesn't really do clicking, and a strategy game that doesn't have any strategy to it, a casual game that's inaccessible. This game doesn't really know what it is.

Basically this game has prestige loops with different objectives each time, kind of like challenge modes in most other idle/incremental games but baked into the core prestige mechanic. The first 5% of your time in each prestige will be buying the exact same upgrades as last time to boost your economy as far as you can before increasing costs make it unviable to increase that way. Then you have the upgrades that just gate content, so you grab those. Now you have three currencies increasing. The first currency can technically increase itself and the third currency, but the self-boost increases in cost so rapidly it's only to get you bootstrapped. The second currency has a small handful of upgrades bought with the first currency that give it a flat X/second income that cannot be increased. That second currency gates the upgrades that give you generators for the first currency, of which there's three and cannot be increased.

This means that both the first and second currencies have a cap of how fast you can increase them per second, that you reach within twenty minutes of a run. After that the second currency is useless and there is nothing to spend it on. The first currency can still be spent on increasing production of the third currency, indefinitely at increasing cost, however there's only a limited number of upgrades you can buy with the third currency, so there's no point in increasing its income.

This basically means that you effectively run out of things to do within twenty minutes of a run and then just sit there waiting for the objectives to finally grind out, while you're fully capped on production and have nothing to do.

There's basically one optimal path to get the unlocks, or who even cares if it's optimal or not, you're barely optimising 2-3 minutes of how long it takes you to reach the exact same cap either way you do it.

Many of the upgrades are nonsensical and worthless. A 30% cost reduction in cultists is meaningless when the the cost of cultists goes up by 30% each time, that just means you can afford ONE extra cultist. Given you will only be able to afford 20 or so, and be getting the other 100+ from the "1 free cultist every 15 seconds" upgrade, being able to afford 21 cultists of the ones you bought is completely irrelevant. It saves you 15 seconds of time for a new one to automatically generate... is that REALLY worth a limited prestige point? Actually it kind of is, because most of the other prestige upgrades are even less useful: Do you really need 15% extra production of a currency when you have nothing to buy with it?

I wanted to like this game, the lore seems kinda fun, if sparse and vague in a way that makes you feel there's nothing behind it, rather than vague in the way that makes you feel there's mysteries to discover.

I wanted to, but I don't. There's no actual game here to like, just a series of barely obsfucated time gates with almost no player agency.

Currently grinding towards the 3rd Prestige, so I feel like I've got enough time under my belt to speak on the state of the game as I've experienced it. I wish I could recommend it, but as is, I just can't. I recognize it's in early access but that doesn't change how it plays/feels atm.

Pros:
-Great Lovecraftian writing -- the story texts that pop up tell a great eerie maddening tale, no notes.
-Immersive metal soundtrack that really gives that gloomy eerie maddening atmosphere.
-Visually, feels very Lovecraftian, so again, verisimilitude for days.
-Cost is reasonable.

Cons
-Doesn't know if it's an idler or an incremental.
-Prestiges are gated, and not always clear as to why.
-You always feel like you have plenty of the resources you don't way. There's 3 primary resources. You unlock all 3 pretty early, and then one of them you start accruing and you can't use it for at least an hour into the game. Just feel weird and bad.
-The upgrades are all kind of necessary but none of them ever feel like "oh yea, now I'm cooking with gas!", they mostly feel like "thank god, now I'm getting a real trickle of this thing I need gallons of, instead of just drips and drops."
-You either need to commit to this being a long, slow, trickle dickle idler, or you're going to want an autoclicker.
-Cost scaling feels bad -- all the various things you can level up provide small incremental gains but their pricing starts to really skyrocket. There's no smart path, no secret to crack the code, you're always kinda starved.
-tl;dr -- mechanics just don't feel fun, don't feel balanced and smooth, they feel slow and frustrating; prestiging doesn't make you feel more powerful, any gain in resource accumulation is offset by new higher demands to clear the next section.


The game is neat, it's immersive and interesting, and it's story and atmosphere are wonderful.

The gameplay loop feels tepid and slow at the best of times and sloggish at the worst of times. Right now I need to get 350 of one type of producer unit, and 100 of the other, and their costs jump up rapidly. So mostly you're just counting on a couple upgrades that generate 1 every 15 seconds. No way to speed that up. No prestige upgrade I coulda got, nothing.

It's the sort of thing I'd expect from a free-to-play phone game. You could argue it stretches out or lengthens the game but that's like arguing that having to bake a cake for 2hrs stretches out dessert, which it doesn't. This only feels frustrating because for much of it you can at least click away and make real progress, but then there's parts where the game just... gates you near the 80% point of a prestige/chapter and you're just stuck accumulating that one thing you aren't getting nearly enough of.

The game is interesting and neat, it's not un-fun, it just falls into frustrating traps that better balanced/oriented clickers and idles don't. The presence of the story is great but I don't want to have to slog through an hour of bleh to pursue it. The game would be honestly enriched, in my mind, by moving at a reasonably steady clip and just giving you that story.

Music is oppressive. Writing is overwrought. After a while starts to feel like I am losing my mind.

10/10 great Lovecraftian idler.

Saves carry over from the demo, so dig in. Would be nice to have better visibility on one-time items/upgrades that have been already been purchased - right now they grey out in exactly the same way that something you cannot afford does.