▼ Not recommended
1 hrs
While the game isn't outright bad, it's a bit too short and lacking. It took me only 1 hour and 50 minutes to finish and I was left with a feeling that the game wasn't finished. Some of the mechanics, like the essence farming feels like you put more resources into than you get out of it during the time you play it, so it ends up being a pretty pointless resource sink. I get that it allows you to earn resources while being idle, but in a game less than 2 hours long it makes little sense.
I also ended up with certain resources that had very little use, just a couple of nodes needed them to unlock.
The skill tree looks big but has few nodes for an incremental game so you don't do many upgrades during a playthrough.
If the game was 2€ I could've looked past the "flaws", but for almost 7€ it ends up feeling half finished and like there was supposed to more content. At the time of writing I sadly can't recommend it as there are so many cheaper and better games in the genre.
▲ Recommended
3 hrs
The purpose of incremental games is to grow stronger over time. In this one, you do that by holding the mouse cursor over slimes to damage them and collecting the essence they drop when they die. You only have a few seconds to gather as much as possible before entering the upgrade screen, where you buy the first upgrade in the center. From there, the upgrade tree expands in four directions.
At the start, however, your choices are limited because three paths are too expensive to access immediately. Instead, you must follow the only affordable path. As usual for this genre, the next upgrade remains hidden until you purchase the current one. Since each upgrade can be bought only once, the next option is usually just a higher level of the same upgrade, gradually extending farther from the center.
Prices increase with each upgrade, but the rewards are meaningful. Along the first path you gain more time, a faster attack, a larger attack area, and new types of slimes that grant far more essence per kill. Attacking these tougher slimes also consumes a few seconds from your timer, but it is still worthwhile, especially because they have a chance to drop a core.
Cores allow you to unlock unique upgrades along the path that improve essence gathering. The first of these is a mine where you can invest essence to hire workers who gather essence automatically. The more workers you have, the faster your essence stash grows. The mine features two types of workers, and each can be upgraded up to five times to improve their efficiency.
By killing slimes, you also earn experience that eventually leads to a level up and a talent point. These points can be invested in five special powers that unlock at certain levels and help you defeat enemies more quickly. The second power, for example, adds a slime that orbits around you and damages anything it touches, while the fifth allows you to shoot an arrow. Once you spend the first point to activate a power, three additional upgrades become available to improve its effectiveness. Each upgrade can be purchased five times, and you can have all powers active at the same time.
After setting up idle essence generation, you will slowly earn enough to explore one of the three paths that were too expensive at the beginning. Once again, only one path will be affordable at first, and it leads to more upgrades similar to those on the initial path. Eventually, as you collect even more essence, you will be able to explore the remaining two paths. These unlock two additional enemy types that drop their own unique resources.
Later on, you also unlock the final feature, artifacts. From that point forward, slimes may drop artifacts that you can equip before starting a run. Artifacts come in different rarity tiers and types, such as defensive bonuses. You begin with a single artifact slot and can purchase up to four more, although each additional slot is very expensive. If you find an artifact you do not want, you can sell it for a quick burst of essence.
Unfortunately, the game does not have a great deal of content. Each of the four paths contains only a handful of upgrades, and the final upgrades raise the cost into the millions, requiring several runs just to afford one. Artifacts also lose their use, and since level up requirements increase and skill upgrades need more points per upgrade, you won’t get much out of them.
After buying the last few upgrades, which automatically collect all essence and enable idle mode, you still need to play for several more hours to fully grow the slime. This growth is represented by a percentage that tracks the total essence collected across all runs. When the slime is fully grown, the game ends and there’s not much point in playing it again.
