Terraformental

Engrossing incremental text adventure type game, with much sense of purrgression.

TL;DR : Très bon jeu. Style particulier (jeu full 2D), mais très attrayant pour qui à du temps à y consacrer. J'ai commencé à jouer au jeu sur une autre plateforme avant qu'il ne sorte sur Steam, et le contenu étant alors moins important il était plus facile d'arriver aux parties intéressantes de l'histoire. Je précise qu'à l'heure de cet avis le jeu est totalement en anglais (très bon anglais d'ailleurs). Ce jeu repose essentiellement sur l'optimisation de vos actions afin de gagner le plus de temps possible, et les récentes mises à jour ajoutent des fonctionnalités très utiles, dont celle permettant la visualisation dans la carte de l'emplacement des différents équipements. (j'insiste que le jeu est souvent mis à jour, tous les deux mois) Le serveur Discord communautaire est également très actif, avec toutes les annonces importantes et une aide active de la part des joueurs.

Incredibly fun Loop style of game, if you love Increlution you will love this one.

The pacing is incredible. Every loop snags you with the feeling that you'll crack the next secret in just...one...more...loop.... and the trick of the game is that this feeling is right. There are so many bits of lore and progress that you are always on the cusp of the next thing. The game breadcrumbs you with this incredible pacing and a surprisingly good story, and tons of things to discover and learn as you get deeper and deeper. Even when you fail to meet a goal you set for yourself, you improve. And while the game feels fairly gated for the first bit, it quickly opens up and you can work multiple angles at whatever pace you want. Truly a remarkable game, I don't say that lightly. Cannot wait for more!

Terraformental is the game you didn't know you needed. It's a text based, story driven, metroidvania with time loop/incremental mechanics. And it is fantastic. You will feel proud *and rewarded* with each puzzle solved. Two thumbs way up.

It's like a text-based metroidvania, wrapped up in a routing puzzle/exploration game using a time loop as its core.

it's a story based game disguised as an incremental game. Good balance imo.

Truly an incredible incremental experience with a fantastic dev that will push out hotfixes at 4 in the morning the day after a patch. I can't wait to have more story to experience and mysteries to uncover.

My review is meant mostly as feedback for the creators of this game, though could benefit potential players. While the later chapters of the game (Strabo, Pneuma, and likely future chapters) require a large degree of repetition and waiting that players not accustomed to the incremental genre likely will not have the patience to tolerate, the presentation and design of the game is very polished, with a game structure that could easily become the standard for a new genre of games. Unlike Increlution, there is a soft cap to how much faster a given action (such as climbing a ladder) will be on a repeat life, limited emphasis on leveling abstract stats, and there is a much stronger emphasis on story and figuring out how to leverage the tools you have available. This means that much of the focus on the game is trying something else next time, or making use of the information you learned last time to see if you can do new things next time (for players, the protagonist automatically uses information -- you don't really have to keep track of things and think about it yourself). The main advantage this game has over most text-adventure games is that all of the options are readily apparent and clickable (i.e. no text entry or keyboard required), and in many cases the solution to an environmental puzzle can be brute forced with patience and repetition. This means that, like many incremental games, the game can be explored and digested with little actual focus on the text and story, and this coupled with the atmospheric music means that the game can still be enjoyed while mentally checked out. It is also this feature that I think makes the creative decision to have the player wait minutes at a time to get back to the latest part of the game become a decent experience. To be clear, there certainly could be *some* kind of improvement to the repetitive experiences (e.g. inner monologue for story, a mental boost minigame for incremental progress, or even a simple recommendation to the player that they click away and focus on something else for a minute), but without this waiting between repetitions the end of a given run, where you try to figure out what to do with only thirty seconds of air/water/food/energy left, there would not be nearly as much tension and engagement, and it would make the brute force approach feel more tedious. What this game lacks, in my opinion, is a way to alert the player on what to do when they've basically tried the same thing three or more times. To be clear, I did not find the game hard at all, but in a world where many people are out of the habit of long-form reading, I think this game has the potential to reach more players if it leverages the robust UI system that makes the game feel so polished. The game already alerts the player if they're about to make an irreversible decision like modifying a tool for mobile use, and it is pretty easy to play the game without knowing things like that there is a schematic map available (which I found pretty helpful for figuring out why I had trouble reaching the glacier). I think the core currency of this game, and the thing that's really being asked of its players, is patience, and I think if the game really is a "brain on" type of game then it would be improved with things like occasional text entry (e.g. entering a password you've learned). The fact that the player is never asked to actually keep up with such information and can beat the game without knowing the story suggests that that isn't the kind of experience being aimed at, hence my recommendation.

Gracefully combines progression by knowledge and steady passive improvement, making them both feel meaningful. A good exploration story attached to that makes the entire experience incredibly enjoyable