EDIT: Following my posting of this review, the game has updated to V2.2 with a change of retirement perk and base letter per second values. I will not be revisiting this game but I don't believe these changes are adequate to address the deeper underlying issues, especially the poor progression.
The other reviews have warned me, but I decided to give it a shot anyway. With how the game is in its current state, I have to agree with the other reviews to not recommend this.
Pros:
The game, for what it is, works. The UI does what it has to, you have a clicking area in the top left to start earning letters (your primary currency), and an upgrades panel under that, and you can get more monkeys on the right side. In the middle you can see the mass of your monkeys sat at desks that periodically pop pages out. Settings actually save, resolution, audio volume, etc do not reset when you re-open the game. Low bar, I know, but the number of games out there that fail at this is astonishing.
The game is an interesting take to the Infinite Monkey Theorem - "a monkey hitting keys independently and at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare."
Cons:
I'm not even sure where to start. The game has taken the "an infinite amount of time" of the theorem practically literally. Pacing starts from slow to essentially non-existent. Once you get to the final "monkey", the Gorilla, you sit in wait to reach your first Retirement Point (RP), occasionally buying end-game monkeys to boost production. By the time you have made your first RP, you have made about a quadrillion letters, which with semi-active/almost idle progress, takes a day or two.
What the game doesn't tell you, though, is that each RP earned only boosts your production by 1%, and every RP takes more and more letters (and thus longer and longer) to acquire. Prestiging to cash in the first set of RP will only lead to disappointment as you've obtained a whopping 4, maybe 5% production boost.
Fear not though, you can spend your RP on upgrading your monkey's production. The first upgrade per monkey costs ONE RP, for an amazing boost of 1%. The next upgrade? 5 RP. Then 25 RP, and so on. The upgrades cap at 10 max, so you can spend at least 5k+ RP to boost that Gorilla by 10%.
If that potential 10% boost doesn't excite you, there's also the daily banana drop. The game starts with giving you a tease of 15 bananas, which is enough to upgrade one monkey's production by another whopping 1%. The upgrade starts at 10 bananas and increase by 10 every upgrade. The daily bananas take 18 hours to grow 10 of them, with 6 hours to collect them before they rot and you don't get them. The timer resets when you collect the bananas, rotted or otherwise. Be sure to reset the timer at the end of your day, else the odds of them rotting whilst you sleep/work is incredibly high. By the time your Gorilla is at level 3 and you have to wait another 4 days to have enough bananas to upgrade it another 1%, you start questioning your continued engagement with the game. Maybe you want more bananas a day? There's an upgrade to increase the daily banana drop by +1, which also caps at 10 upgrades. It starts at 100 RP though, so you might want to sit tight for a year or two.
Whilst you're waiting for the monkeys to eventually write Shakespeare, every so often the game throws a minigame at you, put the characters in the right slots to form a word for a bonus of letters. This is a very limited word bank of common words, with a hint button which hints the right characters (you still have to drag the characters in yourself), at the cost of an amount of the reward. The minigame, however, is not anagram safe. The word "case" will not accept "aces" for example.
When that minigame isn't available, you can instead go hunt for insects that periodically appear in a separate minigame. Each insect you catch will boost your first and most insignificant monkey's production by 0.0X%. Every little bit helps, I suppose.
The upgrade system offers new upgrades when you hit certain milestones, usually from having a specific number of monkeys or clicks. I'm not entirely sure how the upgrades get calculated but later on, that 2x production upgrade you've just bought somehow only results in only a small boost in actuality, unfortunately.
Your end goal is for the collective to generate enough letters to somehow write Hamlet, a goal which you automatically obtain at 1 BA letters. Yes, 1 BA. Understandably some incrementals find it difficult to represent large numbers, so this game has decided to start with alphabetical labels at the 1 trillion mark, as 1 A, and the 1 quadrillion mark is 1 B, 1 quintillion is 1 C, and so on. For some reason, that only goes up to H, then it continues as AA, AB, and so on. I can't be bothered to do the math but 1 BA is around 1e48, give or take a few orders of magnitude. By the time you get to 1000 of each monkey, you ought to be pretty close to this already, just give it another bit longer.
Just to throw in some additional nitpicks: The decimal indicator doesn't respect regions - this game uses commas instead of periods to denote decimal point. Use of AI for the description of upgrades (as per the steam store page). Dodgy positive reviews from users that only have a few hours in the game.
The dev also seems to have more planned down the line for the game, as I browsed the news for this game since it's release - The dev is aiming to include a "major content update" that will introduce nearly 200 achievements. The dev also does seem aware about the slog progression of the game, having added offline earnings (at a 50% rate) and "speeding up overall progression by 35%" by adjusting hire cost in update v1.4, and a note about further speeding up progress on the v2.1 release.
My verdict: At the current state of the game, don't bother getting it, even if it was free.
To the dev: I'm sorry if this review is not a pleasant thing for you to read. Your release post shows that you were happy and enthusiastic to share this, and whilst it has it's polish in places and you are continuing to update this, it just leaves the impression that this still needs a lot of work and probably should either have been released as early access, or delayed until more gameplay and a more palatable progression plan was put in place.
Tl;dr - Game progression bad. Find something else.
