Orb of Creation

1.0 is obtsue, random, and tedious.

I would have refunded this game, but it took slightly over 2 hours for me to reach that conclusion. So, with the cost sunk, I did my best to get my money's worth. The game touts its "lack of handholding" but it makes no attempt to tell you how anything works. You can piece things together over time by digging several layers deep into tool-tips, but it's still difficult to figure out how all the things fit together. So, I don't know if I'm playing it wrong, but for me, this game is a continual frustration engine. There came a point where everything I want to do costs thousands to millions of times my resource storage capacity, and even though these are things that drain resources over time, rather than needing to be paid all at once, the cost per-tick is still tens to hundreds of thousands of times my resource storage capacity. When I finally figure out how and/or gain the ability to increase the storage capacity of that specific resource, I discover that the cost of the thing I was doing has increased by a larger proportion than my storage capacity! I don't know why the cost increased -- is it tied directly to my resource capacity, or did the things I did along the way to increasing storage capacity increase it incidentally? I don't know, I can't figure out how to find out, and honestly, I don't care anymore. It's extremely frustrating because I think there are some seeds of real innovation in here, but I feel like all its systems are working to hinder each other.

Interface is a jumbled mess of screens, it's overwhelming and does a terrible job of onboarding new players. There's better idle games out there. There's better active idle games out there in a similar vein, like Magic Research 1/2. There's a neat idea buried somewhere in this mess, but I have no desire to try to dig it out further. 3 hours was enough.

The amount of time you need to sink into this game to progress without SATISFYING progress honestly starts to get to be too much. This game is primarily based around spells with cooldowns. You want your spell to be better? Modify it with a size glyph to make its effect better, but it costs a TON more now and its cooldown jumps up into the minutes from an already hefty 12 seconds. Having to wait a minimum of 12 seconds between ANY amount of progress with absolutely nothing else to do is painful, and the waiting never stops. Sure it's fun to experiment with some spell combos, but I feel like just stopping every time I'm hit with the wall of wait without enough of a reward to justify that waiting. And the cooldowns only get longer with the newer spells for newer resources. Soon you'll find the only way to progress is by making specific loadouts focused for one resource you'll be minmaxing to get the most out of it before you inevitably have to stop playing. Cooldowns go slower when you're on a different loadout, inflating the wait times even more, and you are 100% unable to touch a spell while it's on cooldown so you better make sure you wanna dedicate that slot. It just gets to be too much too fast for not enough.

I found this game overly complicated. It grows to about 7 different tabs with different components. It was difficult to track which resources were getting generated from where and what resources were needed to further other mechanics.

Starts ok, but the more complex it gets, the more and more of a PITA chore it turns into. Everything needs to be clicked manually, this is not an idle game at all, there is no automation whatsoever, which is why I bought it in the first place. Further in the game, some resources are not regenerative, you must continuously craft them manually, and it is just SUCH a chore! And a bunch of them require other non-regenerative resources to be crafted, which you must constantly juggle. And their costs are exorbitant. The more I try to play it, the more I feel like I DO NOT want to play it. It would be far better if there was AT LEAST skill auto-casting, but not even that little exists! Almost zero automation! The only automated thing is auto-buying trivially cheap upgrades, but for some dumb reason it is SLOW as hell! I open upgrade list, I stare at gray-priced upgrades, and nothing happens! It just takes forever! What a waste of time. I'm sure some people who enjoy doing boring chores might enjoy this game, but I am not one of those people.

6/10; I appreciate the attempt to make an incremental game with layers/depth but it starts feeling like busy work, fluff, and... I'm not sure if randomized elements are the best for this type of game.

This game is just wayyyyyyy tooooo complicated. There are like 20 competing mechanics all entangled. You'll find yourself gated on a resource, and then you have to dig through all your spells which are not very clear to understand, or all the many things you could upgrade, which are slightly more clear to understand, to try to find something that ungates you. I think I got to around the midgame. I was working on agromancy and the workshop. The agromancy is extremely painful and resource intensive, so I'm casting the same spell over and over again to grow one fruit tree but it turns out my mana generation is not even close to up to snuff so now I'm sitting waiting for my mana to recharge. If you like looking at a billion pop up boxes that all say something along the lines of +2.67% cantrip spell power, and then you like looking at all the other little pop ups to figure out which of your spells are cantrips, then this game is for you. If you like watching number go up without thinking way too hard about it, this game is not.