I really, really, really wanted to enjoy this. The incremental systems involved seem so much fun: There are swatches you unlock, machines you unlock, upgrades in the "system" that you unlock. All of these things can be upgraded. There are over a dozen different types of number that can be applied to the bar you're fighting. There are like 100 swatches with different effects. Dozens of different objects that help you fight the current bar.
And I want to experience that and upgrade all that and be invested. But it's very slow, even at 4x speed. You aren't going to get any kind of meaningful reward unless you get far. "Getting far" can be an hour long. Both early game and mid-game you can encounter obstacles that hard-counter you and effectively stop your run instantly. Due to the nature of the game, there can be a hard-counter to literally any object you have. Most of the objects are more "conceptual" in nature. The swatches are the same way. What I mean by this is, there is every possible combination of "thing" and "effect" and "mechanic", which is cool, but it also means that 75% of them are basically useless. Even if you had a build designed entirely around (thing), object or swatch that affects (thing) will STILL be useless.
And that's assuming you have some kind of cohesive team/build that would be benefitted by that thing, which is very unlikely. Even if you did have it, it would get hard-countered almost instantly in the early game, and so you wouldn't have that thing anymore, because you lost and had to restart. As a result, only a couple builds actually work, and so the objects and swatches that actually have any meaningful effect go down from 25% to 10%.
The game has activated skills, which have one use: "activate them all and hope it gets you past the hard-counter you're experiencing". The game, very politely, has a crosshair ability that lets you spam click on an item that requires spammed clicking without you actually doing it. Very nice thing to include when your chief source of progress is "button you click really fast". However, even that has a struggle: when you click anything on the screen at all, the crosshair vanishes. After all, you can't use the autoclicker AND click on the item, that's getting the effect twice. Problem is, when I click on the screen it's to upgrade something, or use the help command to see what something does, or to interact with an event on screen. Still, doing any of these things makes the crosshair vanish, which means you have to go back and pick up the crosshair and put it on the item again or it sits there doing nothing. Which means you must avoid interacting with the game to properly use it. Even the minor details make you not want to interact with the game, it's painful.
There's so much cool ♥♥♥♥ but all of it either doesn't do anything or you can't enjoy any of it.
