Cradle of the Dark Brood

First up, ignore my playtime please, as i was already playing the playtest prior to release.

This is a awesome game. it has a rather slow start, but you start getting more and more accustomed with the mechanic and the game loop and once you reach the 4th stage/level and unlock prestige it starts escalating and getting faster and faster.

Cradle of the Dark Brood has multiple powerlevels to increase the strength of your "Brood". you start with critter and start mutating them, later even into birds, amphibians, carnivors and so on. those evolutions can be leveled as well and provide passive stats, raising the stats of your units even more.

all in all its a very good game, which starts introducing mechanic after mechanic, but never "overwhelm" you with it (never gets confusing).

once you reach a certain point (for me it was multi battle) you really start to feel like the lord of a calamity, conquereing massive amount of enemies with your strong soldiers (easly 3 or 4 of your soldiers vs 50+ enemies) and watching the clear of the stage (called conquest here) like a wave is sooooooooooo satisfying.

a full clear (of the playtest) took me around 30h. for the price of the game, that amount of playtime is totally fine.

It has a cool story as well, with a rather nice twist (which explains a lot, i.e. why the world-map looks this way and so on)

The developer has his own discord and is super open for feedback, bugreports and QoL-Requests.

I have played the beta version and loved it. The full version is fun too!
It starts a bit slow, but as you explore, the things get sped up. There are a lot of QoL upgrades and, with time, they allow you to play the game fully idle.

The game can be completed in 1-2 week at a leisure pace of playing.