Cradle of the Dark Brood

I can cautiously recommend it for its mechanics, but very much not for its writing: the more text I read, the more I suspect most or the entirety of the game's lore was written by a LLM. If that is the case it hasn't been disclosed on the store page, and if it isn't the case that it was written by a LLM... well, it certainly feels like it was, and maybe the author should rework their writing style, in that case. Edit, having beaten the game, or played as much of it as I could stomach (goal became 'perfect clear all regions'): ending didn't improve the experience, and still felt lackluster reading. As usual for this style of game, working up to the ending is unnecessarily grindy compared to the midgame and even early game (only Asbury Pines did worse). Conclusion: Terraformental is better worth your money. Your Chronicle is (technically) free. Both are more engaging, more worth your time, and to the best of my knowledge written by humans.

Well. I played through it. Completed most of the every. I came here after playing the "Idle Reincarnator" made by Ryuse Games as well. Here's Why I don't recommend the game...After 22.3 hours. 1) Use of LLM AI. Most of the text in the game feels like it was written by AI. Low effort with no soul behind it. 2) Game is completely unbalanced. Like the type of unbalance that should not have made it out of the first draft. SPECIFICALLY. Did you know that if you get the upgrade that gives your brood starting statistics then you will automatically produce enough "Divine essence IIRC" to immediately reset and upgrade the ENTIRE RIGHT HALF OF THE PROGRESSION SYSTEM. One Upgrade Trivializes half of the progression. 3)There are upgrades that are completely pointless to buy. For example. There's an upgrade to scale the mutation gain and mutation strength but they are completely pointless after you get the upgrade that carries over mutations between runs.

This dev uses shady tactics to promote this game and I got deceived by him as well. Generative AI slop that was not self-reported to Steam page, he hides this fact about AI, which can be acknowledged only from other players' comments. The UI is garbage that uses default engine sprites, well just take a screenshot and go ask your AI how to improve it if you have absolutely zero taste. This confirms why you show a big bright fps counter in a damn 2D game.

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.

Definitely worth the $4 - $5. The beginning was a bit boring, almost refunded but the systems kick in a bit after. There is a bit of AI generated story text in between, but its not bad either. In a sequel or another patch, it would be cool to see the systems expanded a bit further with some more customization. Overall not bad.

Nice, busy incremental game. Maxing out the achievements were fulfilling, the story is nice, the automatizations are unlocked in time so managing all the things don't get overwhelming. If you like the genre, you should check this out.

Had some good elements that made it compelling to play for a stretch but there is way way too much idle time. Of course a lot of the idle time can be avoided if you figure out the systems and just abuse very poor prestige mechanics but then your 'play' time is not really worthwhile. I was very impressed with the potential here living within a very clean UI but ultimately there are way too many stats and systems that exist for their own sake and add nothing meaningful to the gameplay. I kind of feel like I was hoodwinked into thinking this was a really great game for the past few days.

Pretty good incremental game. You start with 2 critters and breed them. Then decide if a child is stronger or weaker and promote him to become one of the new parents. After multiple selective breedings your units become stronger and you start conquering the world. After you repeat some actions few times a way to automate them unlocks. There are also multiple reset systems in the game as usual. It takes about 15h to 100% the game.

really nice incremental game, want more took me 14 hours to finish it

Honestly, this is a very light, borderline broken game. The premise seems interesting on paper, you breed little critters, watch them get stronger, cooler, ect. The issue boils down to how functionally broken half of the systems are, along with the plot basically not existing, only drip fed via little text blurbs as you fight through more areas. Oh, and honestly my worst gripe? NO OFFLINE PROGRESS, THE GAME MUST BE OPEN TO ADVANCE AT ALL.