Cult of the Yellow King

it plays terribly, the pacing and upgrades are awful its not really worth money.

This is a qualified recommendation: this game is not finished, and at the time at which I write this review progressing to the fourth prestige reset is not possible. There are also some minor bugs I've discovered, such as the way the relics don't always update or load properly between prestige resets or turning off and then turning the game back on. Usually saving, quitting, and reloading has fixed these issues, though once it took me three such quick reloads before it "took." Still, I haven't actually lost any progress. just had minor inconvenience, so I see these issues as part of the growing pains of development rather than game-breakers. Having provided those caveats, this is a delightfully creepy game, with fungal-based cosmic horror as its central theme. Pretty easy to learn and figure out what to do next, made even easier by the mouse-over tooltips, as well as by the fact that if you do *anything* enough times in the game, you'll eventually make progress and new options will open up. All in all, I call this really nifty game design, right on-par with Mega Man X for intuitive player learning right alongside an effective and useful tutorial system that doesn't intrude unless you want it. The art and writing are both top-notch for what they're intended to do, which is to say, slowly creep you, the player, out with the dread of cosmic-level existentialism and the terror of realizing just how much of a monster you really are. I actually had to think for a while after reading part of the descriptions of my most recent acts as a cult leader before the full implications of what my in-game character did sank in. Besides all that, the writing isn't really long - it's to-the-point, and what a point it makes without requiring me to strain my brain while I'm a little sleep-deprived. Instead, the strain comes later, as I'm lying in bed, and the full realization dawns on me with awful clarity. As for the art, to elaborate, again, it's really creepy, which is what it's supposed to be, and also quite interesting from a purely aesthetic standpoint. More than that, though, it's like the writing: as functional as it is effective in conveying the cosmic horror of the game. As the bits of in-game art pop up, each of them acts as a visual representation of progress in the game, letting you as the player know how far you've gone, and how far you have yet to go, because all the little widgets are sized just right to the available space: if the screen is completely filled, you've done everything you can do, and don't have to go scrolling through the menus to make sure. All-in-all, I'm looking forward to seeing how this game evolves (...poor word choice, sorry) as it progresses through the stages of its complete development. It's not a finished product right now, so if that's not your thing, this isn't for you. Same with if you're not into cosmic horror, player character-as-monster, body horror, or creeping existential dread. If, on the other hand, none of those trigger-tags turn you away, this is probably a game for you. Oh yeah, and it's an idle game with effective variable player interaction, so you can choose how much you want to be clicking or just letting it run (though it does have to be running - at present it doesn't have any offline functionality, but since the game is fairly short that's not really a hindrance at present). That all needs to be said.