This is a challenging review to make, because Lored is a very complicated game.
From the standpoint of someone who is a long-time connoisseur of both indie games and idle games, I appreciate titles like this because they are very much auteur-driven. It's a one-man project through which much of the developer's presence and particular quirks are obvious. It's an artistic exploration as much into the mind of the dev as it is a game, and the landscape within is very interesting. In a land full of AI slop and hastily-generated games that don't try anything new, it could be thought of as a breath of fresh air. Unique is a perfect word for this game.
However, interesting does not necessarily mean good. For instance, there are several messages that use "gay" as an insult, or the over-played "are you acoustic" meme. Every one of your "resource collectors" is a stick figure that has an entire conversation tree, some absurdly long and some absurdly short. The humor(?) is a combination of occasionally clever meta-humor, absurdity, and edgy aggressiveness, sprinkled with extraordinarily dated memes. For example, many of the Stage 1 Loreds are just off-putting or aggressive to you, and you're given the choice to start an argument with many of them for no particular reason besides that it's just all that you can do. A good number of the later upgrades are just memes that I barely remember ever being funny.
The developer is clearly a hateful person, and I don't mean that in the sense that they are evil or bigoted. In fact, I happen to agree that the pay to win mechanics you often see in games like this are predatory and annoying, but it takes a special kind of person to design and animate an entire character (and conversation tree) around a person graphically eating (and enjoying) literal turds to represent the kind of gamer who buys pre-release content for games and then dedicate their entire conversation tree to saying things like "I am very stupid!"
There's no other word for that than hateful, like the person at the playground who says things you agree with but then punches someone's teeth out over it.
At the same time, there are so many fascinating details that are unusual and new. For example, the developer gives you full access to the game's code inside the game. At any point, you can go open the source code from the menu and look at exactly how anything was written. It's a great metaphor for how much of the dev is being laid on the floor here, you're getting a full view of who they were when they created this game and why.
I think it's interesting to play a game like this because it does provoke a lot of reaction from you, either good or bad. It's a very opinionated game, so I feel it's difficult to come away without an opinion. But so far I've only talked about the side content. I'd like to talk about the gameplay, because I think everything I've said so far would lean towards a positive recommendation... if the game were better.
For one, the game is very messy. There are many bugs and missing quality of life features. For one, after running the ui calibration in the beginning, the ui immediately became wrong, and refused all attempts to fix. I had to manually adjust the UI scale, apply, and then re-check every time that the upgrade pop-up wouldn't go off the right side of the screen, making the cost of half of the upgrades unreadable. When you open the Autobuyer widget for the Loreds, it pops up without readjusting the Lored's position, covering the Loreds on the right half of the screen - so when you open the Autobuyer for any of the Loreds on the right, they are covered up by the menu, and you have to move your mouse somewhere else to close the menu, where Loreds on the left don't get covered, so you can just click the widget again to close it (much more convenient). There are several other places the UI gets buggy or unintuitive.
But the messiness isn't just functionality, either. Most of the upgrades explain themselves to you in less than 4 words, and many of them have unclear or patently strange functionality. For example, in Stage 2, there are several upgrades to Thingys (that's what they're called). One "Increases duration by -0.1", one "multiplies duration by .7x", and one "reduces minimum duration by 1s". As far as I can tell, all three of those are just moderate speed increases to the rate of Thingy production, but made as esoteric and arcane as possible.
Next, let's talk specifically about the gameplay.
I have heard it said that there are three kinds of games. Games where the developer gets to have the fun, games where the computer gets to have the fun, and games where the player gets to have the fun. This is most definitely the second kind, though an argument could be made for the first.
As you advance into the game, your resource production capabilities are improved by the addition of mechanics that add complexity but not depth.
First, you unlock juice, which has to be produced by one Lored, but it's not affected by your output upgrades because they can only produce one at a time, but when people drink 1 they actually get a random amount, and they also have a maximum juice which can also vary as you upgrade it. While Loreds are juiced, they have a random upgrade to their output and a random multiplier to their input and they also get a *random* extra amount of crit chance... That's right. You have to first ROLL how much crit chance you get, THEN roll for a crit with that chance. Then there are Lucky Chances, which I think are like crit crits that roll when you get a crit. Anyway, you ALSO roll a random bonus to your haste, but for each .1s below the maximum haste you roll, you get another 100% bonus to your output, so rolling lower is actually better.
And THEN anyone who's juiced can also drink red enraging juice for more random bonuses that all interact with and change all the others.
If that sounds interesting to you - don't lie to me. Your eyes glazed over and you skipped that paragraph after the first sentence, because it sounds like gobbledegook, and it is. Especially because you have no interaction with this system whatsoever. All you know, and all you need to know, is that once you unlock juice, eventually, randomly, sometimes, things will be faster. It takes a long time for that bonus to become consistent, and even once you're far past stage 1, it never really is, meaning that every upgrade feels invisible.
Sure, the computer is making a LOT of decisions that all might be very interesting, but the player doesn't meaningfully engage with any of it. All it does is make the game practically impossible to run offline, which the dev presents at the start of the game as an intentional design decision that is key to the gameplay, rather than just being a natural result of designing such an overcomplicated mess.
That's just Stage 1, too. In stage 2, every time you crit, you get a random amount of coins and draw cards and different cards apply certain bonuses - to what, I'm not sure. Again, there's nothing you can do about them but try to potentially understand them.
Where this forms an ironic death for this game is that almost 50% of the game's text feels like tutorials of some kind. Almost every Lored has a conversation option to have them explain various details to you like you're five years old, like how "Output means how much I output!" Yet these mechanics I just (poorly) explained are never elaborated on in the game, outside of the barebones, suggestive titles of the upgrades. The dev either got bored of trying to explain or simply gave up, as, like I said, you don't really need to know how it works. You click the buttons, you get more various currencies. Eventually. Kinda. Trying to understand more than that is an exercise in misery.
This is why I said interesting does not mean fun.
If you do feel interested in making your own opinion about the game, do not pick a harder difficulty, like I did.
