I beat the game and would probably not recommend it. Felt very grindy/repetitive in a not interesting way for an hour or two. There were times where I thought it was fun, but it needed to move more smoothly between resources. On top of that, I think the gameplay loop needed more meta things (challenges would've been good to include earlier, for example, and would've fixed a lot of problems in regards to feeling repetitive). I felt like a lot of the constraints were close to feeling interesting but weren't quite there, like the size of the box increasing just a little bit even with repeated upgrades and eventually breaking.

I actually would've preferred if the game was less grindy and took less time, unlike some of the other reviews. $5-$6 might be expensive for the game, but I count enjoyability over raw hour count (with Stanley Parable being an excellent example of being a game with a high price to hour ratio). I also feel like a lot of the graphics could stand to be improved (although I did play with shake off) in terms of animations, but I don't have anything concrete besides that the game felt very, very barebones in terms of sprites/gfx.

After playing 10 hours, I think I've finally reached what I'm willing to put up with. I read some other reviews, and agree with pretty much all of them (good and bad).

As a clicker game, there's too much going on. You *can* play it as a clicker game, but frankly I don't think it'd be a very good one. I don't have much to say on that because I don't play clicker games, but this doesn't seem like one.

As a factory game, it is *terrible* and I cannot stress this enough. Factories by their very nature are about automation, having something complete a task you could *manually* do, automatically, with little to no oversight. However there are several issues:

The UI is the worse case of minimalism I've ever seen. There's no stats, no explanations for what a lot of things actually do, and sometimes specifics can be quite important when it comes to factories. Not being able to see directly how much a conversion machine is going to convert material wise, when you don't have an inactive one, is awful. A lot of UI elements don't make it clear what's actually happening, or give anything else other than a black bar that goes up or down to tell you that something is occurring.

While the buildings also look fairly interesting, there are several problems with the isometric view, not the least of which is that there are a lot of tall buildings which block things behind them and make building or seeing what your setup is a pain. I'd honestly rather have just flat squares for buildings, because at least then I could easily distinguish between what needed to be upgraded, or if something needed to be refueled, etc.

Another big draw of a factory game in my mind is that you are able to refine your build, refactor and upgrade with new buildings or processes in order to simply/improve/make it cleaner than it was before. But due to one of the *dumbest* design decisions I've ever seen in a factory game, it actively punishes you for creativity. Because the more buildings you have, the more duplicates of that building will cost, and the increase is quite extreme. I can't stress just how *annoying* of a problem this is. The fact that you don't get recycling, or even 100% recycling until later is also criminal, because while I didn't test it for myself, I'm pretty sure you can hardlock yourself out of progression or get close to it.

The automation part of the game (having just got to Void stone and quit shortly after) is also a travesty. Silos are one of the worst ways to automate processes I've ever seen, even for a game that's supposed to be grindy. Clicking on the exact silo can be annoying. Finding the silos even with the upgrade to show you which buildings need refueling is annoying. Lasting for only 16 refills (split among 8 other machines potentially) is downright stupid. This is also the *only* automation you get, and because the cost of silos increases substantially with each one you purchase, you have to choose between automating some small part of your setup, or doing it manually. Which might be fine if it was fun to click around on different machines and see how they interact, but it's not.

For reference, I also got to using the optimal layout for extracting or at least close to it from what I can see on the wiki, so it's not like I'm not being efficient enough in progression.

This game feels like it really needs to improve on its systems in order to be better, because I really don't think it's worth playing as an automation game, and it's not 'cool' enough as a clicker game for me to be interested.

P.S. the 'story' kind of sucks. The only good news is they didn't decide to voice the story.

This is a wonderful game, although I have two gripes. The first is that it's not especially long, and that some of the segments have no save points for quite a while, meaning that you'll have to repeat entire segments in order to progress. Besides that, it's now in my top 10 games. The visuals are great, the sound design is wonderful, and aside from a few frame drops, it also runs extremely well.

I was curious if anyone knew how to get to the extra stage, as Flandre mentions it, but even after beating her immediately after, it didn't appear to do anything.

You can kill people while stopping time. Doesn't get much cooler.