Orb of Creation

As a newcomer, I find this game quite opaque and confusing, a lot of it due to the multi-level nested menu design reusing the same screen space, and thus the game is taking a long time to present what it is, what its hooks are, and whether those hooks will appeal to me. I'm probably only starting to grasp the intended gameplay loop and how to navigate everything, if even that, but I've decided that I've spent enough time on this and found no interesting promise. Pressing [T] to read tooltips works fine and I'm assuming the content is probably all interconnected and technically provide sufficient information. Maybe you're meant to discover things slowly by yourself aided by this. This could be a great design in lieu of a handholdy tutorial. But given what I've discovered so far, while I can see all these different ways to make numbers go up, I see little purpose or meaning to them. As far as I can tell, it's all just to unlock the next new thing, the next slightly distinct growth function with new descriptions attached possibly intended as worldbuilding flavor text. It's normal for incremental games to start you clueless, and then gradually give you more options and clearer or more enticing directions, but I do not feel any direction here, apart from figuring out roughly how this new option works, and then try to unlock the next one blindly, hoping there's something mathematically interesting to play with. Maybe that IS the intended direction, but it's still not a strong enough hook for me, especially since the game is very involved and not idle at all if you want to progress efficiently. It feels like all of this, or at least the current version 1.0 of the game, was largely made by and for people who already understand this rhythm and wants to enjoy more of it, but unfortunately I'm not one of them.

It's one of, if not THE best incremental game I've played so far. It's not an idle game, you constantly have something useful to do, you can constantly upgrade different avenues of your progress. You can choose a generalist approach, or specialize in the various subsystems in order to progress, the game is very carefully balanced that you'll never reach a dead end, but also you'll have to figure out what drags you down and what you need to improve in order to advance. Careful if you tend to get addicted to these games, I've lost more than one nights sleep to this game, because the "next big thing" is always just around the corner. And even worse, now that it's released in 1.0, it even has a competent NG+ feature that offers various modifications to spice up your next run.

This is why you don't do 3 years of updates without letting players test it to tell you you're taking it in the wrong direction. Release version is significantly more frustrating than the early access version that went without an update for so long people were convinced it was abandoned until the news at the start of June.

I finished 1.0 in pre-release testing (most of my time spent playing is older versions, though). It's amazing. This is my favorite incremental of all time, and one of my favorite games of all time.

Having beaten the game: this is an absurdly good constant-engagement incremental, but if Steam allowed it this would be more of a "sideways thumb" or "mixed" review due to two glaring flaws. I'll go in-depth below, but for my fellow ADHD Andy's here's the Sparknotes: [olist] [*]This is a constant-input game and it does that part really well, yet two mechanics frequently gate you for 20 minutes to an hour at a time. [*]Build freedom is super varied and fun to tinker with, but once you commit you can't ever change and if it doesn't work out you're screwed. [*]The game is amazing beneath those two things, but they're both so awful that I'd say this is a "think carefully" buy. If one or both are improved, I'd probably highly recommend Orb of Creation. [/olist] The first major flaw is time gating. Despite Orb of Creation encouraging and requiring near constant player input, there are two mechanics - Agronomy and Ritual - which entirely revolve around pure time gates, and these timers are almost completely unmodifiable. Most of the time the game plays at a frantic, almost explosive pace. You batch level hundreds of attributes in a literal second, timed with back-to-back spell inputs to get obscene returns in an instant. Meanwhile, Agronomy and Ritual can put you on a literal HOUR of waiting time before you can interact with the mechanic or progress to the next resource/overall upgrade. Ritual is especially offensive, because atop its egregious timer issues, it also has some absolutely absurd cost requirements on its completely new resources. The ever-increasing pace of gameplay just grinds to a complete halt, as you generate resources as if you'd just started the game all over again, except you need to wait 20 minutes between each batch. It even seems bugged or overlooked in some areas; the upgrades designed to make Ritual accessible (Expert levels) pereptually cost more of the new resource than I could ever generate or even hold, so I wasn't even able to invest in them until I had essentially skipped all the Ritual content through other generation methods. There's no real deep argument to make against this time gating, all I can say is that feels straight-up wrong. It is completely at odds with the core identity of the game and every other mechanic, and I genuinely have no idea why either Agronomy or Ritual made it into the game in their current state. The second major flaw is more nuanced, and it has to do with build variety. Your agency as a player to think up or try strategies. This one is painful because Orb of Creation has had an enormous amount of thought and careful balancing put into its web of interconnected mechanics, yet it also tries to stop you from experimenting with these things at every opportunity. On the good side of this; the design behind the resources and expert skills is incredibly fun. Most of the time when you get stuck, it's actually an opportunity to think outside the box, as your toolset in this game is massive. E.g. if you run out of scrolls, you don't necessarily need to buff the scroll-generating attribute; you realise that scroll is a Magic resource, so you could buff your Magic-generating attributes in the Wizardry tree. Or wait, you could use a spell that boosts all Magic resource gain before you build? Or wait, you could put Magic enchantments in the Alchemy table and use a spell to buff Alchemy- you get the idea. The tragic side; despite this wide toolkit where everything plays nice together, the game basically forces you into vertical investment around the mid-game point. Resource costs grow exorbitantly high across the board, which you can keep up with - if you focus on that specific resource at the expense of others. You'll ultimately likely focus on a handful of main resources and use tricks to supplement the others, and probably won't even touch upwards of half the expert skills/augments on offer. This is somehow made worse by the fact that despite REQUIRING you to invest vertically, the game PUNISHES you for not investing horizontally. You'll hit walls where an ability you've not invested in is suddenly mandatory, requiring you to get it up to speed. Except the resource for levelling it up has gotten more expensive each time you've levelled something else. The skill points to level it up come from buy any attributes, yet the number of attributes you need to buy increases each time - alongside the actual attribute cost. See the issue? The more expensive it gets, the more you specialise, the harder it becomes to play outside of your niche. And then the game forces you outside of your niche. There's no respec option, no undo, you either grind through the pain and pray it gets better or you start again. And believe me, after reaching mid-late game, the early game feels PAINFULLY slow to revisit. With all that said, here's the constructive feedback: [olist] [*]Rework/rebalance Agronomy's time gating to get significantly faster with investment than it currently does. [*]For the love of all that is holy just remove Zeal, it is an abomination with no place in this game. In its current state it is just awful and if improved it defeats the purpose of Ritual. Please just rework it to a more up-front resource cost and maybe tie each ritual's bonus to a number of following rituals, e.g. "your next X Rituals give Y effect". Or it attaches a random reward to 3 random rituals so you're encouraged to chain through them in weird orders for bigger rewards. Anything is better than this. [*]Fix the resource scaling when entering a new mechanic in the lategame. At the very least the Expert Skill costs for Ritual should be HEAVILY reduced to accessible flat early figures, the big gate on them is Orb points anyway. Or make the Expert skills cost something other than Ritual resources. [*]Buff the Time prestige system and make it available at any time in the run, with rewards scaling based on progress checkpoints and a big boost for actually completing the game. It should make the ultra-early game tutorial much quicker and should be available for when people hit a wall or run out of steam. Starting a new game should be an exciting opportunity to try a different build idea, right now it feels like giving up just to start a new chore. [/olist] I hope these things change, because beneath all the annoyances I think Orb of Creation is actually a really inventive, fun and challenging game. But until they do change, this is just a tentative "yes". Buy on sale, just beware if you think the flaws above would bother you too much to enjoy it.

The early access version of this game that won Best Incremental Browser Game of 2021 is substantially more fun than the 1.0 release. As of the time of writing, you can play the early access version (0.5.4) for free on itch or by right clicking the game in your library > Properties > Game Versions & Betas > select v0.5. I do not recommend purchasing the 1.0 release for the current price ($12 USD). The changes between the early access version and the 1.0 release are focused on slowing down the player's rate of progression and removing the number of tools that the player can use to solve problems. In order to try to force each run to feel unique (something which I am doubtful was achieved), the developer greatly reduced the amount of content that can be accessed in a single playthrough of the game. These changes are in service to a prestige system that most casual players will never interface with, either because one 40 hour run was enough or because they already dropped the game out of frustration. Detrimental changes: - Almost all of your spells, glyphs, artifacts, alchemy recipes, and rituals are randomly drawn from a pool. The number of times you can draw from this pool is small and you will not be able to get everything on a single run, limiting the number of tools available to you. For example: you cannot rely on using alchemy to ameliorate a poor wood production, as you may never roll the alchemical recipe to transmute wood. - Attributes now take roughly 2 seconds to develop after clicking. In a game in which the primary action you take is purchasing attributes (the achievement for purchasing 100,000 attributes is one of the most commonly completed), this adds up to a substantial and unnecessary slowdown. - Researches now require advancement points, which are awarded every few hundred attributes purchased. You will not be able to get the majority of researches on a first playthrough, as opposed to the early access version in which you could develop all of them with enough time. There is no ability to reset and reinvest your advancement points, meaning that the only solutions to a poor distribution of researches are to power through a slowdown of 10+ hours or to restart your save. A first run of this game will take 30-40 hours if you interrogate every tooltip-within-tooltip for hidden mechanics, 40-50 hours for the casual player, and 50+ hours if you invest your advancement points in researches that look fun rather than researches that strictly help you alleviate production chokepoints. - You can no longer set the levels of your spells (which determines their costs) individually. Rather, there is a single global variable that determines the level of all spells on all loadouts. I found myself constantly navigating back to the wizardry screen to fiddle with the global output level, as I needed to adjust it nearly every time I switched loadouts and sometimes even between different spells on the same loadout. In a similar vein, druidry and alchemy also have a single variable that determines their costs and outputs. I found myself adjusting the druidry output level every time I had to switch types of plants that I was harvesting. - Progression is gated behind a new mechanic called agromancy, which requires real life time waiting for plants to grow. Unless you heavily invest your very limited advancement points into druidry, you will often find your chokepoint to be waiting for plants. - Crafting is no longer instantaneous, and there is a heavy penalty for crafting large quantities at once. This incentivizes a playstyle of clicking the crafting buttons once every 15 seconds, waiting, and doing it again to avoid the bulk crafting penalty. - Alchemy has been cut down, with the number of recipes you can have active at once greatly reduced. Instead of long, carefully-balanced production chains of resources, now you can typically only bulk-produce one or two resources at a time. As you progress, nearly every alchemy-exclusive resource is moved to an aura attribute that produces it without the need for alchemy at all. - Individual researches rarely feel like substantial power boosts, though they can be powerful in aggregate. In the early-access version, each research gave you immediate access to new tools and mechanics. - The prestige system does not feel rewarding. My first prestige run was about 25% more powerful than my first run, which was noticeable but not exciting. You can expect to earn roughly 6 of the game's 50 achievements on a first run. Each prestige run beyond that point will earn another 2-3. - This may be a matter of personal preference, but I find the 1.0 version to have a worse ui layout than the early access version. Overall, an extremely disappointing experience with the 1.0 version from someone who loved the early access version.

I bought this game back when it was just the NG experience, with no NG+, and I chose to wait for the full version to come out. Save got corrupted, so I went through NG again, expecting a more polished experience. Nothing has changed in the ways that matter to me. This game is like crack cocaine in the worst possible way. If you suffer ritual dopamine starvation, don't play this game, because it's just going to go down like a family-sized bag of chips - you'll feel like you should play more just because your brain desperately wants justification for all the time you wasted on making number go up. For the record, some people say this isn't an idle game, and I agree - I'm going to still compare it to idle games, because the point of those games is that idling is your "breakpoint", where you get to stop actively playing the game. This game does not have any form of traditional breakpoint. Worse, it's incredibly hard to judge where actual breakpoints are. I would assign myself a "breakpoint" like I would for any other game, but the game would constantly jostle me away from those objectives when I realized they weren't attainable, and suddenly a reasonable breakpoint would take several hours of engineering to resolve. God help you if you're like me and invest in the researches you LIKE instead of the researches you NEED for a given moment. Learned my lesson by the second half, but the first half was perpetually committing to things I liked only to realize things were about to start sucking. (I hate Agronomy.) The game has about 12 different individual progression screens and every resource calculation made is influenced by at least 12 different stats - both what you're spending it on, and what type of resource it is. The moment you stop making progress on one of these screens, the most reasonable thing to do is to switch screens and look for one where you start building up stats faster, and pray you find your current build deficiency in a reasonable amount of time. If you aren't building up stats quickly, the game can slow to a slog. Spells are nice in earlygame but reliance on them can easily create situations where you use a spell to nudge yourself over a gap, only to realize you PROBABLY would have been better off shoring up your passive resource gain instead. But if you neglect spells, their casting level will drop so low you have to dedicatedly build that up the next time you try and use them. If that happens, you've unintentionally boxed yourself into either spending an hour buffing spells, or praying to God you can just slowroll passive resources through the game and leave spells as they are. (You literally can't. Ritual passive completion is nowhere near good enough to be viable for that.) If you rush down the game and unlock everything at about normal rate, not dallying but actively trying to reasonably pad out and engage with each thing you unlock, your NG experience is probably going to be somewhere between 10 and 40 hours depending on how much the game's constant rebounding back to a previous screen throws you off. The reason for that massive time gap? This game never kills you, but it believes you should measure your setbacks in minutes or even hours instead of seconds. By the point you've unlocked 4-5 screens, if you have my specific flavor of brain problems, you are now in literal hell. In Realm Grinder, the best comparison I can make, your first run can be stalled after maybe an hour or two, with the game encouraging you to reset regularly when you feel like the game has slowed down if you want to play actively. In other words, in RG, you get a choice: Stop playing and see if idle can push you over a breakpoint, orrrr just reset, get a resource % boost, and play again. This game does not believe in that concept. At every opportunity, the game seeks to waste time in a way I find a step backwards for this genre without adding any meaningful growth or spark. It's like someone wanted to make a game for ADHD people to relapse onto. It condenses this concept that people enjoy making numbers go up, or solving problems on a checklist to make it easier to make numbers go up - but doesn't understand that the appeal of many of these idle games is that they're easy to pick up and put down, not a constant time challenge taking up the entirety of your consciousness. Let me put it this way: I ended my first run with like 150 Orb EXP. The scale starts at ~20-50 per level and quickly ramps to like 200 an attribute level. I did not feel like I found a breakpoint once, only times where the game slowed to a slog because I misprioritized. At those times, I had to find a way to recover my run's tempo or burn 30 minutes to an hour getting my system back on track because the next resource I needed actually required me to HEAVILY develop a system I'd neglected and already invested my Orb EXP elsewhere. God help me, every time I thought I was done with any of the randomized systems, they just pulled me back - except the randomization made it a slog to tell what I should actually be doing. I don't recommend this game. It will eat up your time, your energy, your focus, your everything. It has no breakpoints. It doesn't let you automate spells, it feels like a PERMANENTLY active game. If you are unskilled in your ability to pull away from games, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. You WILL ALWAYS be looking for breakpoints the dev refuses to give you. I did write a whole review of each individual part, but Steam won't let me do anything like that, so: If you want to break almost every bar-based resource flow in the game, when you roll for spells, look for Rolach's Cube. Put as many of those on your bar as you can, mass cast them, and then eat an Agronomy missing % fruit. You can cheese a significant amount of resource production this way if you, like me, don't want to waste hours trying to fix your research allocation via further grinding. As a NG player - NG+ is basically just harassment. Did you hit a new breakpoint? Were you looking forward to the incremental NG+ experience? Cool. No. This is a Souls game, actually. If you want to reset your NG+ you have to beat the game again. F♥♥♥ right off. It's an interesting game, but completely bogged down by the sheer concept this is anything like anything else in the incremental genre. It isn't a game. This is just number go up dopamine simulator in the worst way. Every failure on your part is another hour sucked up by an unfeeling numerical god. I like challenges. This isn't a challenge. This is "I'm having trouble so I'm gonna go to another screen and click on stuff until things become easier". I found this a dense web of BS that I came out of the end completely unwilling to engage with because it was just a constant push and pull of "Ah, my spells are overpowered" and "Ah, my spells are underpowered". Also, Zeal rate sucks. That's my most pressing critique. 0.0004 or smth base rate? Seriously? After total overinvestment and reorienting my entire Alchemy setup to try and maximize my Zeal gain, I was getting... 0.04 or so per second! Wow! e: I'm aware of the most recent patch. Sorry people who want to continue abusing the fruit - given, I'm pretty sure that Roland's Cube doesn't stack additively. That's all I'll say. My current advice for the dev - assuming you're coming back here to check if I changed anything, considering how quickly you nerfed the fruit after I pointed out how ridiculously effective it was. (No, I don't know the Discord landscape, so maybe it's just been known.) People don't crave NG+ just for difficulty's sake. I assigned my NG+ reward points in a way that I realized does not spark joy, because I didn't realize I would continue unlocking investment options throughout the run. I want to reset my NG+ in the middle bc I want to apply that knowledge. If your NG+ is going to insist I play the game all over just to play with the NG+ features again, no. That's just cruel.

It is with the heaviest heart that i put this to negative. This is mayhaps the most engaging game i have ever tried. It demands all of your attention, for an inordinate amount of time, and your brain will be happy to give it. The promise of finding rewarding line in a incredibly complex schema is astounding: However, from 0.6 and 1.0, it remains nothing but a promise. At the altar of randomization of inputs, any semblance of difficulty squeeze has died: Optimal strategies are far from needed, and the game pushes you endlessly to just keep clicking upgrades. Do that, and everything will solve itself, fundamentally, minus suitably brainless engagement with the new systems as needed. I have played 30 hours in a week, and i walk out of every session in a dizzy, anxious brain fog, rather than a contemplating, satisfied mood. Not all that is engaging is fun. I look forward to the day i can once again flip this to positive, as 0.3\0.4 were some of the greatest possible experiences in videogames.

Glad its almost time to ponder the orb once again, Best idle game i have played out of 100s, was afraid the dev was gone but glad to see they are back at it. Cant wait

It's not an idle game. It's a full 20-40 hours of active optmization, always moving forward. My favorite incremental of all time, what an experience.