▼ Not recommended
18 hrs
This is a tough call -- if Steam had a neutral review, I'd have given that. The game has enormous potential, as seen from the demo, but it never leads to anything. It asks "What if the hero in Horripilant was Alice in Wonderland?" and then never answers itself. The art is obviously lovingly detailed, but then shrunk down to a resolution that you can't tell what you're looking at. If you're looking for a dark incremental RPG to pass the time, I think Horripilant or Count of Monte Clicker give more payoff for essentially the same cost. At the same time, there is a lot of gameplay to see and decisions to make for a $4 charge.
▼ Not recommended
9 hrs
Tentative Non-recommendation; You'd be happy to hear that this cheap incremental is not another 3 hour node-like. But as an RPG incremental, the game reaches autopilot phase very-very quickly with next to nothing to do other than unlocking new subsystems and buying everything; you progress through the dungeon very slowly while one-shotting everything only because the game doesn't have speed up function, and the final unlocks rely on this dungeon with slowly scaling incomes, turning the endgame into a time wall that last for hours.
The game starts out strong, very. The Alice in Wonderland setting, the hand-drawn artwork, combined with the RPGMaker feel thanks to it's font selection, it is a charming game, even though the latter can be argued to be an unintended effect. The early game sets you up for something great as you unfold new mechanics / subsystems with a short, concise narrative mixed with the dark atmosphere as you find your way out. Soon you unlock the main system of the game, the Abyss, turning the game into an auto-battler, going deeper into the Abyss, and by extension, the madness as the painting starts talking to you, unfolding new mechanics along the way. The adventure begins.
But then you reach the farms system, and suddenly everything gets downhill, fast.
Theoretically, it's where the game should shine; New systems, upgrades that affect other systems of the game, creating that sense of synergy and inter-connectedness, every incremental games do this.
But at the same time, the mystique, horror feel drops entirely; The painting stopped talking, the music selection gets calming, even the narrative starts to slow down to nothingness. It's as if you're accustomed with the madness that you forgot your main objective.
This translates into new unlocks getting increasingly unexciting; they trickle down to flavor texts to the interactable whose unique text can only be seen once.
Said over-arching upgrades? They completely throw the game's delicate pacing out of the window as you suddenly get so much money you can essentially upgrade your equipments super fast you just outscale the entire dungeon for a long time you don't have to worry about it anymore.
This would not be a problem, after all you don't want to keep your players baby sit on a mechanic for too long without automations.
But it is a problem here, when each subsystem has their own currency; the dungeon being one of them, and your dungeon scales your enemies so slowly because each dungeon runs for 10 waves, with no option to speed up the battles in any way, even though you are one-shotting them right on your first turn. That slow scaling means you're just waiting to get enough currency unlocking the next thing, with absolutely nothing to do. This bottlenecking only gets worse when the final unlock suddenly requires astronomical amount of it, turning the final part of the game into an asinine, 2-3 hour long waiting game with nothing to do, as you pretty much already have all the remaining systems completely maxed out, other than the Abyss, with their useless upgrades as you're way too overpowered with thousand fold damage difference.
And that what makes the overall experience disappointing, there is so much to like, but the second half of the game drops the ball so much that by the end it ends up spoiling everything. I too remembered playing the demo of the game when it was published on galaxy.click, and my first impression was rather positive that I somewhat look forward into the full release, even though I didn't finish the demo (which ended at the farm phase). Too bad that it come out like this.
