It's a pretty nice game with a nice mutation system. I think with some tweaking it could be easily worth monetizing. As it is now, it's perfectly alright as a free game with around 3-5 hours play time depending on if you want to achievement hunt or unlock all upgrades and whatnot. But I can see some spots where it could be improved with just a few changes.
Firstly I think it would help to have an onscreen tutorial, which sounds absurd since it's such a simple game, but it took me until day 20 to realize there was even a pause menu and a bit of guess work on the first day to figure out which button to be able to interact with. So just something with a quick pop up saying "WASD to move, E to interact, Q to open Inventory, and Esc to open pause menu for further information." would be completely serviceable and friendly to new players.
Alternatively, more onscreen UI wouldn't hurt. Like having a bag icon next to the letter Q would be more intuitive on what the Q is supposed to open, next to a pause icon with ESC to show that a pause screen even exists and how to open it. Along with that, an "E" popup when next to interactable objects, similar to how it was done with the bed would be helpful to new players.
Moving away from that topic, a Day counter could easily be placed next to the Money counter for ease of visibility so that it's not exclusively on the pause menu. Other small quality of life changes could be having the name of the plant or the plant information sidebar automatically pop up when placed at a table that you're facing or when holding it instead of having to open the inventory or go to one of the tables to ascertain which plant you've grabbed. On that note, possibly differentiating which 'strain' of a plant you have would be nice, like being able to name it and not have to go back and forth between the analysis bench to double check that you're planting the correct tomato plant and not the one you meant to throw out.
Also, being able to choose which part of plants you want to sell from the processing bench would be nice, since there's been times where I didn't realize the fruit of a root plant were able to be sold and did sell all and lost the compost material for something that didn't even give me good enough money back to be worth it. It's able to be worked around by manually selling what I want from the computer, but I feel that it quite nulls out the benefits of being able to sell from the bench in the first place.
On the note of composting, I really like the fact that the compost is used for levels, however I feel that towards the latter half of the game, especially getting that last field plot, I was just composting every part of the plant except for what I needed to replant because I had so much money it stopped mattering and I was quite a few levels behind being able to unlock it. Not necessarily bad, but it was a noticeable grind that wasn't very fun. At one point I was just buying up all the stock in seeds, planting them, then immediately composting them to just get that few extra points in.
Other than those, I don't have much else to say outside of just a few small things that could just be neat to have, like a information panel on the pause screen or on the computer to show how much produce of each type you've sold, or how many plants of different qualities you've grown, how much time you spent idling overall, how many times you've analyzed plants, what day you got the trophy, and so on. Not really a need, but just would be rewarding to see. Something also potentially nice would be having a watering or fertlizing system to manually try and encourage certain traits, but I could see how that could become repetative or too easy depending on if it wasn't balanced quite right.
Overall, a great game for it's purpose, and very reminiscent of fun lil games that come out of game jams. It could do with additional polish and be easily worth a buck or two, but I have nothing bad to say about the experience as of now.
