I've given this developer's two projects, Kin and Quarry and this title, Kin and Conquest, a fair enough shake each. Despite being underwhelmed by the prior release, and somewhat underwhelmed by the Demo for this release, I elected to give the title a spin.
TLDR: While brief, this game can be fun in short play-sessions of 30 minutes or so at a time. That'll give you the optimal experience and help you stretch the game's legs out where it's overall mechanical complexity fails.
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I'm far from the most adept of game players out there, but I do look at the Iterative Games subgenre with some attention. For me, the appeal in this game genre comes from prioritizing, optimizing, and strategizing. The more interactive and player-directed the solutions to the presented obstacles, the better an Iterative game can feel. In yonder past, you'd call these 'clicker' games, though the genre of Iterative Games has in many ways escaped this restrictive concept of format.
Kin and Conquest is one of many distal evolutions of Universal Paperclips especially upon completion when player input is entirely optional and inconsequential. Yet somehow, Idle Factory remains perhaps the single best example of this genre, being both simplistic and having a long-enough tail and an interesting enough puzzle. Kin and Conquest's core conceit is like many Survivor-likes, giving the player the control over the character to avoid damage whilst prioritizing (at first) collecting resources.
Meta Progression and the upward climb feels weightiest in its earliest phases, and if you grasp the mechanical design of this game, you'll swiftly push through the game's penultimate challenges within about 5 hours. I spent perhaps an extra hour or so after concluding the game's final challenge just getting extra milestone unlocks, not entirely to the point of 100% upgrades, but closer than deserved. Completing the game's full 12 levels each with 3 challenge ratings goes relatively quickly, at times certain upgrades will chain together fluidly from run to run with a good sense of progression, and at other times you'll be twiddling your thumbs waiting to scrape together enough coins for a final upgrade.
At first there's an illusion of play style and player choice, but it swiftly devolves into filling out all upgrades and using large-AOE multi-hit weapons and inflating your attributes with specific gear choices incorporating only the two highest level options available to you. This isn't bad, per-say, but considering the game wears out its welcome within 6.5 hours perhaps says more to the design, implementation, and general lack of depth.
Kin and Quarry also suffers this problem, terminating abruptly before the game can investigate any of its mechanical ideas with any significant breath and depth. Both games for me ran about $11 Canadian, for a relatively mild cost to runtime ratio of 2:1. This developer having done this routine twice with about a 30% increase in runtime, and perhaps a half dozen extra ideas, is after about 6 months of gap between games at first seems quite good for a small team.
However, the lack of substantive development of ideas makes this game ultimately a high ticket price compared to peers within the price bracket. I cannot, on principle, recommend the price to time ratio nor the relatively undeveloped scope and scale of the game nor its rapid release schedule relative to the prior title by the developer. Hopefully in a year's time, they can release something more substantive and mechanically rich. Maybe drag it out for 8 hours? Little incremental goals seem fair to assign, assuming one developer is involved (this is what the steam page for the developer claims).
Finally, the UIX is a little lacking. There are icons showing the equipped items on the bottom of the screen when in the upgrade menu for items, and you cannot click on those to travel to their respective tabs. There also is a problem with the Coin/Essence Exchange not having the ability to "Sell All" of one exchange currency. That issue with the exchange made me ultimately quit, as I was not going to be clicking my mouse over 10,000 times to exchange 2 Essence (useless after the skill tree is filled out) for 1 coin.
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To the Developer:
Were I to suggest a direction for the next Fox themed game shoved out at a prodigious rate, maybe try out the genre of iterative settlements with some more emphasis on between-run terrain generation RNG elements, selections of diverse objectives, and maybe more actual story beats. The last two games have been about an Evil Geomancer threatening a bunch of foxes living in a region, why not now force those Foxes to Caravan from their homes to the promised land? Maybe even build the world some! Cleverly employed narrative structure, characters, and world details can make a simple story compelling where novelty and complexity are lacking. You have the capacity to establish loops, now is the time to build something beyond the loop in which that loop survives.
