Orb of Creation

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.

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.

This game was great on version 0.6, but 1.0 is simply unfun - The dev seems intent in closing all avenues for passive play, there's multiple progress gates that require you to play actively (like agromancy) and everything providing passive benefits has been nerfed to death, as an example you get penalised for crafting many things at once, instead of it simply taking longer it becomes less efficient the more you do - The RNG / roguelike elements are terrible. Before 1.0 the game had a clearly defined pace that was balanced, you could make choices at several steps on which path to take but every playthrough you had the same list of spells, glyphs, artifacts, etc. available to you. Now, you rely on a random pool and if you are faced with two bad options an hour into a playthrough you might as well restart, this is extremely unfun, and completely killed any motivation I had into finishing my 1.0 playthrough. Supposedly it gets better after ng+ but to get there you will have to have invested dozens of hours in the first run Overall, there are better incremental games out there that don't carry a $12 price tag

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.

Very much a 'mixed' review. Short version: intensely addictive, but not very satisfying. I picked up this game when it first launched in early access several years ago, was highly impressed with it and recommended it to all my incremental loving friends. Now that launch is finally here, we collectively dove back into it, and while nearly all that we'd initially loved is still there, the ability to complete the game and start NG+ somewhat oddly added a sense of hollowness to the experience. The gameplay is an astounding dopamine drip for a while. There's numerous major subsystems and mechanics, over three dozen resources, over a hundred different attributes you can progress without caps. There's many different spells, spell modifiers, items, research paths, and alchemical formula to be found, far more than you can get in a single playthrough, so every unlock is exciting and each playthrough distinct. There's *constantly* something you can be doing, upgrading, optimizing. I found myself frequently playing for far longer than I intended, with the enticing distractions so multitudinous and exciting. The problem is, after victory and several NG+ cycles, none of that stuff actually seems to matter much. No matter what special rules the NG+ might be applying, or what unique random spells or items you rolled, the unlocks of systems and resources always happens in the identical order every time, and you need to do the complete tour to win the game. Every subsystem more or less needs all of the others in order to be fully progressing, which felt like a neat bit of integration initially, but in practice meant that trying to specialize much is actually mostly a mistake. Yes, you can try and emphasize being a Druid or a Storm mage, and the resources that benefit directly from your choice will feel empowered. Except, if you leave everything else lacking, then your progression overall will still be stymied, most likely including your ability to feed back into your specialty. Everything is just so interlinked that it almost feels like nothing actually matters all that much. None of those optional, may-or-may-not show up spells, artifacts, or other toys end up mattering much, for largely the same reason: none of them can be truly lynchpin. Most of the systems hosting them tend to reward mastering as many different spells or whatevers as possible, the particulars of limited importance. The NG+ challenges, which impose randomized debuffs to particular subsystems and required specializations in a new run, end up effectively being the same way. You're still going to have to progress whatever the particular debilitated mechanics are, you'll just do so slightly more slowly. I kept trying to find excitement and satisfaction in these special conditions, but I found I was mostly just getting sucked into chasing the bells and whistles of upgrading so many different little things, without any choices or situations being of actual importance. Now, the problems that I'm talking about are actually pretty damned universal to the incremental genre. They're almost always on-rails experiences, chasing the moment-to-moment highs while following a prepared path through the game's features. I think where I find things disappointing is that Orb of Creation really seemed like it could have been capable of transcending that limited vision, and indeed might have actually been intended to, until circumstances limited the developer's ability to spend much time on the project. What is there is *absolutely* a blast, and difficult to put down, as my playtime will attest. It's got a depth and polish to most of it that's still very rarely matched in the entire incremental genre. If you enjoy the genre, it's absolutely a must play, I think. I'm just left feeling like the bones were there to have potentially been far greater still.

I hadn't played the original so i came into 1.0 blind, and I've been playing obsessively. This is obviously a double-edged sword, and your tolerance for addictive gameplay loops will determine your experience, but I've enjoyed my first few games, especially NG+ Some advice: tooltips are essential, as is the space bar search function, to figure out what's going on. Making your own keybinds speeds things up a lot, and there's always more to find. There's a lot of ways to build your setup, because there's room to specialize as well as generalize. I just learned about the "melt" mechanic after 168 hours, because I invested some upgrade points differently. Experiment, especially if you hit a wall, because there's something out there to make things easier.

Very hands on, progress at snail pace, but the biggest problem is the clustered interface with subsubsub menus and not knowing where to go for some stuff. Also the game introduce infuriating rng, being lucky with the spell you get can make thing easier or harder by a lot.