Kin and Quarry

I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, I picked it up, but jesus was it boring. But it never details how things relate. Ferret whats?

Had a blast playing this one. The progression feels satisfying and the game is fun.

Game ran well enough, main issue was that it felt like it didn't know if it wanted to be an idler or a game requiring constant attention. The runs were short due to the time limit, and mostly consisted of clicking on rocks while controlling one mining unit(holding down an arrow key), else the progress would have been slower. After each run, you go to the progression tree, buy what you want/can, unlock new units/change the amount of each, then repeat, meaning it is no idler. You must pay attention, you must keep controlling things (until maybe at the end once everything is upgraded). If this had wanted to be an idler as its tag claims, there should have been the option to just keep looping runs without player input, allowing for passive progression alongside the option to directly engage and speed things up. Think of it like Cookie Clicker in a way but your clicks are limited, and, after every minute of automated and player clicks, the player must pause to chose upgrades and start everything to clicking again. It was a bit tedious, a good time waster if you're on the phone or something, but otherwise lacking in engaging gameplay beyond numbers go up and animals go down. If the intention was something less idler, I would have hoped for something to do besides mindlessly click and hold a key down, maybe some kind of basic enemy or option to go up and reposition or hazards. The drill, the sprites, and the 'events' did help shake things up a little, but the former tended to just go on it's own, the sprites often spawned off screen where I would never see them, and the events boiled down to 'good time to grind' and 'good time to progress'. What did I like? The respec option was neat, though I never really took advantage of it besides the Ascension menu, and allowed me to pick upgrades with confidence. The story actually surprised me with how it ended, and I liked it. Art was cute, game ran smooth despite me having quite a few bomb-tossing ferrets, and the menus were easy to navigate and understand. I also liked that the achievements happened naturally over playing the game for the most part, rather than a 'grind to complete every progression tree'. If the game made any claim of being an idler, I'd give it a negative review. But that's a faulty user tag. So have a positive review instead. The lack of painful grinding for achievements, the story, the art, the basic game loop combined with it being a fairly short game, and the generally chill experience gets it a positive review from me. Getting it as part of a humble bundle and the gameplay mostly happening while I was on a discord call or watching youtube certainly helped, though I'd still hesitate to recommend it to anyone for more than a couple of dollars.