Time Idle RPG

Tried to play for like 10 minutes, but the UI is so complicated and bad it makes the game unplayable at the moment

Update: Got further into the game and guess what.. now it randomly freezes and loses progress lol. It's early access I gather. But, it needs a lot of work. - Starts in this maxed window mode that can't be resized and cuts off the bottom of the screen (alt-enter forces fullscreen window mode) - Eerily silent once it starts - No tooltips on any of the icons or explanation of them. Tutorial tells you to click on this or that but not WHERE it is - Interface is a jumbled mess of too much information. Needs to be separated so I know what I'm supposed to be looking at - Way too many popups at the start with info dumps and impossible to remember it all with all the flashing lights and ♥♥♥♥ - First few minutes were it for me... if I don't know the core gameplay after that point, I'm done

I play a lot of idle games. Like, a LOT of idle games. So suffice to say I've seen my fair share of jank, bad mechanics, terrible assets, cash grabs, and just... terrible, terrible games. I think anyone with any time spent gaming knows just how prevalent this problem is in the gaming industry-- especially in the mobile space. And if you're scrolling through the Idler Free to Play category looking for the next game to sit on your second monitor while you lose yourself in youtube videos or what have you, i want to make it clear: this is NOT one of those crappy shovelware games. I really want to applaud the dev team for the design of this game; it shows a lot of promise, with solid and arguably novel concepts. Trying to stand out in the deluge of shovelware (especially in the idler/incremental genre) is no easy task, and i think this game could easily have become a staple for fans of the genre. However, the challenge of making an idle game is that idle games only *appear* simple and easy to make, and require a lot of very precise and technical planning in the back end. Its on this front that Limited Input failed to deliver, and boy, did it fail. Plenty of other reviews have said plenty enough about the UI issues; a constantly expanding screen layout that simultaneously goes beyond the window size and refuses to let you zoom in close enough to read the itty-bitty text if zooming would push elements out of bounds; a "use your mouse like a touch screen" design whose limited input actively makes the game harder to play without any benefit beyond its adherence to the dev team's moniker; an assumption that the player knows what the dev wants them to do without prompting... Its bad design, not only for its lack of accessibility features but for simply trying to do too much with too little. If this was purposeful, and the devs at limited input set out trying to make a game that was limited in its inputs, they either forgot to, or failed to meet, the inherent requirement of the game still being fun, accessible, and enjoyable to play. But UI isn't the only problem-- even if it's the most glaring issue. The game is riddled with bugs-- the most glaring being the way automation is randomly turned off, various elements reverted to previous states, and scroll-able menus being tied to the same inputs as the zoom feature. Its simply unfinished and untested. My biggest complaint, however, isnt either of these things: its the lack of things to do without a massive initial investment in the game. By using real-world time as its direct currency (and expecting players to eventually invest in upgrades to their time gained multiplier), the game starts out at a BRUTALLY slow pace. Every idler is technically a time sink, of course, but most games take care to obfuscate this until at least 2 hours into playtime with active elements (eg, clicking a cookie, early auto-battler reward progression, an upgrade loop that, while it will become obsolete after a few hours, still feels impactful and repeatable). In Time IDle RPG, you'll be sitting on a blank screen (a difficult to navigate blank screen) doing nothing but watching a timer tick for AGES before you can actually meaningfully engage with the game. TO players intent on playing this, i highly, HIGHLY recommend downloading it, opening the game, closing it, and coming back a month or two later so you can actually play it then. This is an absolute shot-in-the-foot decision that should have been found in playtesting. Now, if you can endure the grating UI, love games with bugs that not only distract but actively inhibit gameplay (gotta love when the menus just don't load properly!), and picked this game up way back at its release, opened it, and promptly fell into a coma long enough to gain the requisite base currency, then... idk, i guess i'd say check it out. The battle art is solid, and the progression systems are thoughtfully constructed (on paper, at least). After all, you get what you pay for, and you'll pay nothing. But if you're getting nothing, why bother?

I have been given more information that the game has been out quite awhile before the steam release. overall that doesn't really change my opinion to much but does make me understand why some are disappointed. I have to disagree with the reviews. All you have to do is read a little and explore to find out how things work. tips- click to expand and then read to see what things do - the fire guy in the bottom bar is basically the tutorial following his information can show you how to go through things i think people just rush through this game seems to have more going on than most.

Interesting game with many different mechanics. Basic currency is Time which you gain just by waiting, it's not just a period of time until something happens, but an actual currency which you can assign to different things. You invest it to a lot of other producers together with other currencies. The main problem with the game is to understand how all those currencies affect each other. And there are some complex interactions. Example: 1. You can assign Time to Wood production, 2. When your amount of Wood reaches certain milestones you get Tents which give you Variants (basically people who you can also assign to different productions, 1 tent=1 variant), 3. Now you can add Variant to Wood production to dramatically increase the amount you produce, 4. You start capturing Ladybugs by assigning Variant and Time to it, it gives you Raw Food and Materials for crafting upgrades for Damage, 5. You build Spice production and again assign Variants and Time to it, 6. You build Food production and convert Raw Food and Spice into Food, which lets Variants to provide increased boosts when there is enough food, This is just one complex chain out of the game. There are others, like Knowledge->Science->Smithing or Research, Seeds->Plants->Tree bonuses, Capturing monsters->Crafting things->Upgrading combat->Fighting/Looting->Allocating experience/Equipment. The game is hard to understand because the UI is obscure and clumsy but interesting mechanics that affect each other still make it interesting.

The UI is a bit rough and could use some work, but if you spend 15 minutes trying to understand it, it becomes easy to get through it and you find a very good idle game, not the best but has plenty of depth and upgrades to enjoy it for a few hundred hours. This thumbs up goes to try to remove all the people who can't take a rough UI and hoping the game gets updates soon that improve the UX experience.

There's something here, and it might even be a good game. But even for long time veterans of incremental games, the UI here is painfully obtuse. I'm not sure what things cost. I'm not sure what I'm making. Sometimes I'm not sure if I've successfully purchased something. I read as much in the reviews and thought for sure that I'd be able to shrug it off. But no. It feels somewhat like if you were playing a complex incremental game, except instead of a computer you were just on the phone with your friend who was actually looking at it, and trying to deduce how the game might work based on his verbal descriptions. I suspect the core mechanics are solid enough, but the UI needs to be redone from scratch.

Interesting concept but not a fun execution. Everything else costs more and more time in return for bigger numbers. So, why are there are no multipliers for increasing how fast you gain time? The lack of such a multiplier turns a neat concept into a massive slog because you will never EVER have enough time to power everything without cheating.

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