I spent 18 hours on this game and 100% completed it. This game really hit for me for a lot of reasons, but the TL;DR review is as follows:
**Pros**
* There's no real tutorial needed; it's just clicking on nodes to progress.
* It's more of a puzzle game than an incremental game.
* A lot of the story is implied through minimal text and only a few dialogue instances.
* You basically get what you signed up for story-wise when buying a game with this title.
* There are little secrets that also provide extra lore.
**Cons**
* The "worst" part, imo, is that the later levels require extremely precise inputs to complete or obtain the secrets. It caused me to use a guide for some of them just so I wouldn't spend another five hours figuring them out.
* You cannot choose to stay as a blob/monster forever, which is a big thumbs-down for me because I like being a monster and get upset when im forced to just be a human again.
* Your shapeshifted (human) form does not reflect the upgrades you get beyond the initial ones. (This is a very minor gripe.)
* There's no good way to know what lies at the end of a chain of encounters—or whether there's another node beyond it—other than simply doing it. This leads to wasted runs and time, which pads the game out quite a bit since some key things can be locked behind these paths. (I'M LOOKING AT YOU, PIG FARM TO ORCS ZONE, AND SEA HAGS TO HUGE BUFF ZONE.) The issue is that your initial judgment is based on every previous zone not secretly hiding a major reveal behind killing something.
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## The Long Version
I absolutely adored this game.
**There will be spoilers.**
### STRUCTURE
This game is structured into eight "chapters." Each chapter has one to three goals and a few secret objectives that mostly provide fluff (but are technically required for the secret ending). How you get there and what blocks those paths is entirely up to you to discover.
This works great in the beginning, where you're simply exploring areas and following interesting paths. However, it becomes more difficult the farther you progress. Chapter 7 is the hardest because the path to the ending requires you to do very specific things in the fairy zone, while also having completed three other areas and still having enough time remaining to finish everything. It was an interesting challenge, but still quite annoying to my sleep-deprived 2 A.M. brain.
### THE TIME PRESSURE
The thing preventing you from doing whatever you want is the timer at the top of the screen, which represents how long you have before the boss comes for your ass and forces you to reincarnate.
This creates a fairly tight schedule as the game progresses if you want to reach any ending at all. However, it also makes each chapter interesting because you're constantly exploring new regions, unlocking resources, and discovering new paths. It follows the idle-game formula of rebirthing, but across multiple maps, which kept me engaged the whole time.
### RESOURCES
There's also a crap-ton of resources. They don't have unique icons; they're mostly just "stats," "resources," and "power." (power being what you use to survive against foes and kill them) These increase when you do things. Some actions are repeatable and provide additional gains, and everything is clearly labeled on the nodes.
For the most part, though, resources are simply gates that prevent progression and only add flavor if you choose to read into them yourself.
### MUSIC
Nice ambient music that fits the genre. No complaints.
### SOUND
The "CHING" noise every time you did something started grating on me after a while because it's basically the only sound you hear. That said, it didn't really become annoying until around the 15-hour mark.
### GUI / UX
Fantastic. I honestly love it. It's mostly just clicking, but it feels right. The overall style is great, and I really liked the portrait artwork as well.
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## STORY
### SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRE GAME
**SERIOUSLY, I'M GOING TO SPOIL THE PLOT HERE.**
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The basic premise is that you get isekai'd, and the king knows where you are and wants to kill you. This pushes you to do whatever it takes—murder, imprisonment, and even using people as breeding slaves (I ♥♥♥♥ you not, that's an actual mechanic in the elf area) to make the numbers go up, stay alive, and find the exit point of the map.
My favorite part of the game comes near the end, when you finally complete your objective but the structure continues in a "real-world" analogue. Lots of isekai stories do this. The mental trial, the goddess trapping you in a fake version of reality to wear you down, making allusions to everything that happened before.
I can think of several stories that did this, and I'm glad to see people continue drawing inspiration from it. Things like *Lord of the Mysteries*, *Sovereign of Judgment*, *Dimensional Sovereign*, and others all played with similar concepts to some degree. Seeing it happen here, followed by the post-scene where your character is absolutely furious, really landed for me.
If I had any complaints about the story, it's that the ending sequence with the Demon King felt somewhat anticlimactic. The process of unlocking the ending was cool, but the Demon King never really rages against you, gives a final speech, or even gets a meaningful last word. They just sort of die, and it felt a little underwhelming.
I think it would have worked better if, after the fight, the player was given unlimited time and simply had to follow one final path. Along that path, they could shape their "new world order" or choose to "return to the past" by gathering some kind of Void resource. Maybe it would only take five minutes, but during that time you could include flashbacks or reflections on everything that happened.
Had the game done something like that, I think the ending would have felt perfect. As it stands, it just feels like it's missing a little something.
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## END OF STORY SPOILERS
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Overall, I liked the game a lot, and most of my complaints are about mechanics or clarity issues rather than the core experience.
## COMPLAINTS
* The shadow abilities need a bit of tuning, especially the one that gives you one second on the boss timer per investment. I think it should either provide more time for less investment (because by the time you've earned 200 Memories, you've probably already spent several hours playing) or be removed entirely. Getting only three extra seconds feels effectively useless when most of my failures were by margins of 10–20 seconds.
* Nodes that contain unexplored paths should probably have some kind of indicator. I think replacing the "gain one second" upgrade with something like this, and making it cost a lot of Souls, would help players discover hidden content that might actually matter. Heck, even making it only visible when you select an adjacent node would be a good compromise because then it only appears if you're paying attention.
* I understand that hidden paths are intended to encourage exploration, but that design clashes with the time-limit mechanic. It sucks to spend several runs repeating the same content just to investigate one missed node, only to discover it rewards something insignificant like 3,000 gold—especially after spending three hours trying to solve it. (Though please don't add a "reveal the entire map" button. That would be lame.)
* When starting a new run, you sometimes get timer-related abilities that provide passive income. It would be nice if you could hover over them in the starting area to see exactly what they do instead of needing to reincarnate to find out they weren't useful.
* With the exception of maybe one chapter, there was always one specific starting boon that felt significantly better than the others. The alternatives mostly seemed to exist as traps that waste your time, which feels bad. I imagine balancing this game must be incredibly difficult, (cont)
