▲ Recommended
2 hrs
The aim of the game is to gain faith by clicking the totem in the center of the screen. Although there are no runs with a timer breathing down your neck, there is still a limit to how much faith you can get from the totem before it has to recharge.
The totem recharges on its own, but you can speed up the process by buying keepers and followers, with their price increasing with each purchase. Later, you will unlock other follower types, such as gatherers that collect faith for you, or lost souls that can be converted into keepers by holding the cursor over them until they convert.
More importantly, faith is used to buy upgrades or blessings in the standard incremental tree. Compared to similar titles, the upgrade tree has a lot already revealed, while the question marks on the edge of the tree can be uncovered by buying the adjacent upgrade.
The upgrades are meant to increase faith generation, so you can upgrade how much faith a totem can generate, the speed at which keepers and followers replenish faith, and so on. Some can be bought several times at an increased price, while others can only be bought once. Those that can be purchased multiple times block progress through the tree because you can only buy the next upgrade on the branch after purchasing enough levels of the upgrade blocking the path. Another limitation is that you can only buy a certain number of upgrades before you need to buy miracles, which are part of a separate tree and use a separate currency.
New upgrades unlock new features, but also new threats. One of these is corruption, which occurs when the timer reaches zero and then starts again. The consequence is that all your followers lose some karma, which is essentially their health. If you do not restore it by clicking and holding the cursor over them, they might turn into shadows.
Shadows are enemies that try to ruin your followers, so you need to get rid of them by clicking and holding the cursor over them until they die. A bigger incursion of shadows also appears when you keep buying different followers. Each new person fills up a bar, and when it is full, the incursion begins.
However, this is also a good thing because killing shadows earns you another type of resource that can be used on miracles. For instance, faith can become more valuable, or your circle can grow larger. The circle is centered around the mouse cursor, and you do everything with it by clicking and holding the button until something happens. The bigger the circle, the more you can do. This is particularly useful for restoring karma to your followers because you cannot see which of them are in danger until you click on them, which becomes a hassle when you have a lot of them.
Anyway, the goal is to gather enough faith, whether you spend it on upgrades or followers, to fill up the karma bar at the top of the screen and earn an ascension point. This leads into the game’s prestige mechanic, which you want to trigger after earning an ascension point because there is only so much you can do in the current run.
Prestige resets all upgrades and miracles, but the ascension point is invested into a permanent upgrade that carries over between all future runs. The first upgrade increases the amount of starting faith, which means you can buy several upgrades right at the start. Then, you can unlock one hundred keepers that are already there when you start a new run, lower the cost of upgrades, or gain something else that will help you greatly.
However, each new run will take longer to reach the next ascension point. You also have to fill up the karma bar four times to beat the game, with each one requiring more faith. Ascension points cannot be farmed, so you have to reach the next karma tier to get another one. Fortunately, each subsequent karma tier has more ascension points, so the best strategy is to get all the available points before going through prestige.
It sounds more complicated than it is, and after you become familiar with the upgrade trees and ascension upgrades, you will be able to finish it without any problems. Of course, as with any incremental game, you will need a lot of time to reach the end.
