Orbita

This game is shockingly fun. [i]By miles[/i], the best $4 I've ever spent on Steam - I'd rank it only [i]mildly[/i] below games like Factorio, Rimworld, or Oxygen Not Included; while being extremely distilled, not to mention dirt freaking cheap. In some ways it has a bit of that idler vibe; but a lot less than it might look from the artstyle: this isn't Cookie Clicker. It's a lot closer to a "conveyor-belts and intermediate products" factory-builder; but crossed with a physics-sandbox like one of those sand-pile games or Noita. The core mechanic is moving little spheres of material around in zero-G, and causing them to react with eachother to form new materials; the further into the game you get, the more complex the reactions required to get the next individual type of material - and none of the materials ever become irrelevant (with a couple exceptions), so your limited playing-area gets real cramped, [i]real[/i] quick. But as you discover the recipe/manipulation necessary for a new material, and assemble physics-based production-lines for it, you [i]also[/i] unlock new tools for managing that limited space and all those moving bits and pieces. I haven't quite reached end-game, but my playing-board (factory? laboratory??) is already vastly more complicated than I expected in my first hour playing; this game definitely has hidden depths. It's EA, but there's a lot more content than you'd expect for the price. I'm about 12 hours in and I'm *still* unlocking new materials and tools. And, jzs, it's more satisfying than any game I've ever played. Period. [hr] I do have some complaints, although none of them bad enough to detract from the overall wonder of how high the price/value ratio of this game still is: [list] [*] Dear god, rebindable controls. Trying to stretch to the hardcoded [Q/W/E/R] keys (the only ones in the game) was a real pain on my keyboard. [*] There's no blueprinting system. Even if you [i]design[/i] a really reliable/clever production-structure, if you ever want to make twice as much of that resource ... have fun manually purchasing and placing, every, single, tiny, component. (And in this game, [i]individual pixels[/i] absolutely matter for placement and arrangement; it's extremely fiddly. Though that is half the fun.) This is exactly the sort of game where that'd be [i]such[/i] a fun progression-unlock - like bots in Factorio, the inflection-point where you suddenly don't have to worry so much about fiddly pixel-perfect placement of every little tiny item would be [i]such[/] a breath of fresh air! (Unless it's extremely late-game and I haven't unlocked it yet; but I've see nothing hinting at it, including in the controls list.) [*] [strike]There's a couple vaguely metagame-ish currencies; but the balancing around them seems ... really wonky? unless I'm playing [i]extremely[/i] wrong, somehow? I'm really impressed with myself and my stable, reliable, fully-automated <Omnianexaia> factory ... but in the process of getting there, I only ever acquired ~10 units of the first metagame/optional currency. There's a [i]ton[/i] of neat-looking powerful buildings locked behind that currency; but now I'm far enough in the game I suppose that the trader that provide it have completely stopped appearing, in favour of other/later metagame currencies. Unless this is a bug or I'm doing something wrong, I strongly suggest that [i]all[/i] the metagame traders continue to appear, no matter how far into the game you get. It sucks to basically be permanently locked out of a bunch of the additional buildings, simply because I was focused on progression instead of those side-quests.[/strike] - Rebalanced in the immediate patch [*] [strike]There's a couple places in the game where something "held" in your cursor interacts with the game-world while you move it around; but then, there's other places where it doesn't until you let go / "put it down". That should really be consistent. For example, a "Matter Compressor" can be waved around - picked up and moved across a big, complicated factory, without it affecting anything until you put it back down in its new home ... but a "Iron Wall" cannot; it will whack into things and throw them out of alignment while you try and move it around, which is [i]horribly[/i] dangerous in this game. This also happens with the "buy" menu, which is even worse, because you can't see what's underneath the buy-menu until you click the item ... which then instantly affects whatever's underneath the buy-menu. Yikes.) The number of times I've gone to relocate a wall, and had it whack a big orb of fire straight through a half-dozen delicate mechanisms, causing my entire board to get destroyed ... oof. Real painful, and not in a rewarding/learning way.[/strike] - Fixed literally a day after I posted this, dang son [*] [strike]Finally, progression in general still needs a tiny bit of work. For the first 14-ish tiers of material, I was pretty much never bored - it never [i]felt[/i] like an idler game, I always had something to work on, even when I needed to save up a good bit of some other material. Progression slowed down significantly around <Omnianexaia> or <Crylexa>; but luckily, I'd just happened to put in a [i]ton[/i] of effort into a very high-throughput <Omnianexaia> factory, so that wasn't [i]too[/i] bad. Unfortunately, even with that cranking along, it is [i]punishingly[/i] slow to produce any <Protexion>; and <Nulvanexia> (which I haven't produced yet) feels punishingly out of reach. (A size-three <Protexion>!? ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, that's going to take [i]hours[/i], even with the entire board dedicated to producing it.) (My experience here is potentially colored by the above meta-currency issue; maybe you're intended to have gathered far more Terra Tokens by this point, and are expected to have shifted over to producing everything with the fancy buildings that gets you?)[/strike] - Rebalanced in the immediate patch [/list] All told, this games is easily an order of magnitude better than - if not *several* orders of magnitude better than - any "idler" I've ever played. You owe yourself giving this a try.