Good game, can't recommend in its current state, if I could give it a "maybe" I would, but we're in a binary where it's yes/no.
This game drew me in with its focus on a "less idle" incremental game experience. I enjoyed the "puzzle solving" when it came to crafting spell loadouts that would accelerate my progress faster than the auto generation would. (Notable mentions to Dense Expansion, and Thunderclap, as S tier spells on their own early game.) When you get to stacking tons of modifiers on top of things, it feels REALLY good to completely fill up a resource bar in one cast, and having the aforementioned spells entirely refund themselves. Plus, the soundtrack is pretty good and I found myself losing a lot of time to this game.
But, there's a caveat and a couple of gripes with that experience. Random discovery. Certain parts of the game feel loosely connected to one another (Agromancy, parts of Alchemy, Research) A lack of a "Upgrade all" button, but that was fixed in a recent patch. (It's no longer find the upgrade you neglected, thankfully.)
To touch on random discovery: Aside from the guaranteed spells you unlock as part of progression, everything else is random. Because it's random, you can get spells you reasonably can't cast (without significantly higher resource cost) yet because of a lack of mastery in that specific spell's school, or spells that are worse than the other options in their category. ( Shape Nature in particular is incredibly gimmicky and weak for a facet of the game that's essentially farmville?) This is made worse by these randomized discoveries also incurring an exponentially scaling cost, which feels a bit overtuned until endgame, but at that point you probably have all the spells you ever need and are abusing other mechanics to get by.
Now apply random discovery to alchemy, or artifacts. Alchemy can be used to supplement a lack of resources in certain areas, like synthesizing water or wood, but that's ONLY if you get the recipe for those items. Similarly with artifacts, they're pieces of equipment that passively buff certain parts of your abilities. (Higher cast power, lower resource drain, etc.) You don't need these items, but if I want to specialize in alchemy, and the game is giving me equipment for druidcraft, well... I guess I'm a druid now? The randomization dashes any specialization hopes.
Agromancy: It's farmville. Grow trees. Grow bushes. Wait five minutes. Turn them into other plants. Wait five minutes. Harvest the plants for resources. Replant. Wait. Run out of space. Consult the research tab for more plot space. Shape the earth. Make a puddle of water. Destroy the puddle of water when you realize you can make higher quantities of it with a spell. Consult the research tab for more plot space. Harvest fruit trees. Realize fruit by themselves are the only part of this system worth engaging with lategame outside of the lategame ore mine.
I honestly do not know how to fix it, other than add empowered plants to the midgame, since that only ever felt tacked on and needed for one building (the mine.) I guess also make certain options more viable, like the water or Elementia spring, by buffing up their resource generation. The fruit are 100% necessary for any progression lategame and I wish plot regeneration didn't take so long for this reason alone.
I mostly ignored these tiny gripes until I reached endgame, where all of these issues came to head.
The final stage of the game, rituals, is where the game's pacing becomes glacial and it took me about 40% of my total playtime. It's a combat system with about as much depth as the Agromancy puddle.
In order to do a ritual, you have to wait for a resource to replenish at hundredths of a second, and then fight a bunch of enemies to complete the ritual. The resource generation itself would not be a problem if the speed at which it regenerates wasn't relative to how low on the resource you were, and wasn't so low even with a lot of research. I only ever got it to 0.080 a second, but I didn't really focus on the research here if I didn't need to.
To balance this, ritual rewards are really good. Buffs that last upwards of 20 minutes and empower your resource generation or reduce costs of the other facets of the game, or even generate resources when engaging in more combat or upgrading things. I felt the buffs were worth the wait with sufficient duration, but some of the rituals are random discovery and some are clearly better than others; notably all the ones that generate interest of a particular type of resource.
But this stage of the game also introduces almost a dozen new resources that are harder to get than the last. Enemies killed in rituals drop dust and ectoplasm, and with rituals active eventually divine shards and Beacons. Then you need ore, which you make from agromancy, which then turns into green metal bars, which then turns into hexed bars. There's two other resources made with crafting and alchemy, and they come in short supply until they don't. That's nine new resources that aren't part of the magic resource bars, and this mechanic introduces three of those you have to fill and contend with too.
So now you need to make about nine different equally annoying to get resources while also managing the other facets of the game and upgrading everything, and making sure you can sustainably source these things... or you can hope to get rituals that give you interest on these resources, and buff up these types of resources as far as you can to reduce overall NEED for this things.
But. The combat is awful. (Pro tip: You can click on enemies to prioritize them as a target.) Combat spells themselves need their own magical resource bars to cast, instead of mana. Because spell discovery in this game is random, you can get unlucky and not get any new combat spells outside the guaranteed one, or get ones that are just objectively bad, like the shield spell. If at this point you've neglected spells for any reason, you're going to be grinding output level for a while to deal reasonable amounts of damage to enemies that exponentially scale. OR you can just put it all in the auto-attack you eventually unlock, and only buff that up, and not engage with the combat outside of what is strictly necessary. Your mileage may vary based on how kind RNG discoveries are to you.
Even the UI for rituals is awful and doesn't tell you any information like enemy health and attack levels? I get this is probably the "No hand holding" part of the pitch, but it does suck to fail a ritual because it exponentially scaled in the span of two levels, and now I have to wait for my ritual resource to regenerate at a snail's pace.
I'd rather a version of the game that didn't have randomized spell or alchemy discovery. This game does a good job at providing the illusion of being able to specialize into something, until your progression grinds to a halt and you need to look elsewhere for whatever upgrade or research you're missing. Of course, it's irrelevant since Rituals will time-gate you anyway. Honestly I think the whole Ritual stage of the game in general needs to be overhauled with how time consuming it was.
TLDR:
Game good, fans of puzzle solving and min-maxing and spreadsheet games will probably enjoy this because:
- Number go up. A lotta numbers go up.
- Crafting a spell loadout and mixmaxing it to get huge bursts of resources for free is fun
- The soundtrack is good.
- Despite the focus being on active playtime, you can idle the game if you want, as inefficient as it is.
I cannot recommend because:
- Randomized discovery kills any sort of specialization hopes.
- Agromancy feels unfinished and tacked on in some areas, despite being a vital progression step that needs real-time mechanics to engage in
- Rituals are a shallow game mechanic that require real-time waiting periods to engage in. Combat is bad with enemies that exponentially scale and the game gives you no info about it.
