Orb of Creation

At least a few iterations ago, this game felt like it was about exploring a massive upgrade tree and playing with everything to see what it does, cleverly using features from three different tech trees together to briefly command several universes worth of electricity so you could purchase a new upgrade that would open up more interesting tools. Now exploring too broadly has become a poor choice, and enough poor choices (i.e. studying expertise in too many things before the endgame expertise types are introduced) can, no joke, no exaggeration, make the game take ten times longer to complete. The punishment for mistakes - for exploring too much, for being too curious - is that the progress slows down dramatically and the game becomes this loop of farming for random drops and casting spells and then just waiting for more drops and for your spell's refractory period to end. Bad drop, bad drop, bad drop, bad drop, bad drop, GOOD DROP, keep going until you've got four of the things you need, cast a spell, consume your drops, watch 12% of your expertise progress bar fill up, repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat, damn it. Sweet, you earned one expertise level. Just eleven more to go. Skill issue? Sure, I guess. On a second playthrough now that the game has made it abundantly clear what it does not want me to do, I can just follow a more narrow path to the ending and not be distracted by things that sound like they'd be cool to play around with. Laser Bees with Katanas? Huh, I kinda want to see that, but I guess I'll have to wait until a separate 30-hour entomology/metallurgy playthrough. I really have to focus on magic robes and flip-flops this playthrough OR ELSE. I know a lot of time and effort has gone into this game since the first version of it I played, and countless people playtested it and gave feedback as things moved along to make sure it's the best version of whatever it's become, but having not been part of that transformation from early early access to 1.0, this game now feels unfamiliar and low-key hostile. The magic is gone.

This hurts, as the pre-1.0 release was something I had so much respect for. I'd recommended it to friends for the nuanced and interesting ways it handled resources and systems. 1.0 somehow manages to be both less intuitive, making it near impossible to make informed decisions, AND utterly inconsequential, turning once-meaningful choices into a mess of "just click everything, nothing matters." The last update before 1.0 ended with Rituals, an active combat system that felt awkward in an incremental game. But it was the beta, so surely more content and extra passes on the existing content would solve that, right? Nope. The only thing that's been added is a longer grind and NG+ options, after gutting the Ritual system to make it less interesting and more of a wait to make any progress. 1.0 introduces roguelite elements to the game, which is likely the core of the problem with the new direction. When your progression is randomized, all possible outcomes must be viable, so there's no way for a developer to plan a curated route of growth. The result is a muddy nothing of a tech tree, where every new unlock costs more but may not actually be better or even relevant.

After spending a long time in this game, I wish this game was an idler or didn't change how it was in the beta Okay, to understand why this game should of picked, lets talk about how the game used to play and why it's fun Like many idle/incremental games you gather resources to get upgrades, but unlike most games you don't have a horrible starting way to get resources and slowly get upgrades that give you a trickle of other resources. no you have spells that just give you a massive amount of resources that let you get multiple upgrades at a time. you end up this amazing loop of trying to cast spells and upgrade as fast as you can. the best part is the game knew it, the game lets you overflow on resources and still buy upgrades and made passive income upgrades more to help cast other spells than being a way to get resources so the game was high paced and seamless when unlocking new resources and challenges Now what happens is right before you unlock a new resources/batch of spells you hit a wall going 250MPH, it's indescribable how fast you go from casting spells like mad to "guess I'm going to sit here for the next hour" If this game would build like a idle game, I.e built around the idea of you coming back every hour or so, this would be fine if not even better. No this game is built like a incremental game so you're not going to make progress unless you sit there and grind it out. And the knife in the heart is this isn't a one time thing! it's every time! if you buy this game, you will love it at first and leave the game hating it

It is what it says, "a non-idle incremental-puzzle game". Plays like an easier but more hectic version of a Cultist simulator

I didn't know that 1.0 had came out and just wanted to play it since it had been a while, and alot has changed from the original, and not all for the better its less about spell combos and more find the button that makes progress, not even unlocked everything and i had about 5 main tabs, each with atleast 2 sub tabs, and upwards of 5. its a mess and i stopped using half of them because; there are too many upgrades offered when resources are nonexistent, researching enough of a tab gives some form of upgrade point for artifacts, augments, materials and what not. too bad you only get one each bar completion and need a metric ton of them to make a substantial amount of progress on all the options given the game was a lot of fun the last time i played it, and going into this version i was excited but my god, its more a tedium simulator by the half way point as upgrades and effects are bloat, the resources you need can't be acquired via spells and you just have too wait,

i can barely not recommend this game. Ive only played the 1.0 version. My first run through the game was exploratory and mostly blind. The game already transgresses here. A lot of terminology is left unexplained (jargon like rate, gain, base, special vs. power). It does not hold your hand at all. Its also very easy to lock yourself out of really good upgrades because the so called "research tree" wont tell you what researching a thing unlocks. and it doesnt even look like a tree. You can not even see the choice to upgrade something really powerful and you dont know what youre not missing until you spend very valueable research points that you cant refund. Youre also always better off researching scholar / expansion every single time because cost scaling reduction is overpowered in an incremental. That said the game is quite poorly balanced. some spells just instantly outshine others with no contest. Leading to the next transgression. By far the worst portion is the RNG involved with NG+. You can luck out on your discoveries, or you can simply never get one of the obviously OP options. you get rerolls, but that only offsets the issue and makes it more frustrating when you reroll a mid option. Agromancy also does not respect your time. It forces you to wait 20-ish minutes for a plant to grow so you can get a new resource. There is a spell to reduce it, but it only shortens it to like 5 minutes of waiting where you are staring at your monitor waiting for this spell to come off cooldown (if you werent lucky to get one of the OP augments that can fix ALL your cooldown problems!) TL;DR: - Game does not respect your time, doesnt educate and incentivize the player to understand its mechanics until they have suffered from doing otherwise and looks up a guide. - Game is too RNG heavy, you can miss OP stuff by pure chance. - Endgame progression is too RNG and not satisfying.

it was a really fun game before the 1.0 update, now it's held back by randomized spells, alchemy, etc which can and will screw you over now to mention the end which had me saying "that's it?" out loud

The systems are complex and interesting, but I had to power through the last half. It was just a slog after you have to upgrade hundreds of tiny things to do anything.