An incredible incremental game in the making! It is only about 50% complete at the moment, give or take about 10%, but it already easily stands side by side with such games like Orb of Creation and Stuck in Time, joining them as a new "medium incremental"
This kind of game isn't for everyone, but that is what the demo is for. It is an amazing demo, and you will almost certainly find out if the game is for you or not once you try it. Any progress you make in the demo will also carry over to the main game should you find yourself interested. The gameplay in the main game is a fair bit more complex than the demo, party because you just have so many more options, and partly because a few more mechanics are introduced, but it is still ultimately the same on a fundamental level.
Much like with the other aforementioned games, with Terraformental you are in for a good time, AND a long time! At somewhere around 44 hours of gameplay at the time of this review (I have 4 hours in the demo), it completely dwarfs the length of any game in the still young(ish) genre of short incrementals. The demo itself is already twice the length of the standard 2 hour short incremental, and completely free! Better still is that this amount of gameplay is expected to increase quite significantly in the future. Updates seem to come out at a pretty reasonable pace, and the game is set up to have potential for some pretty freaky optional challenges and replayability for those of us who are truly deranged.
As for the game itself, it was greatly inspired by another, medium, arguably long incremental: Increlution. Unlike Increlution though, the game is actually good and respects your time as a player and human being. Playing it doesn't feel like being forced to eat dirt or do prison labor. Increlution was like a wolf in sheep's clothing when it came to advertising itself as an idle game. Terraformental avoids this mistake by completely dropping any pretense of being idle whatsoever. There is no idling here, and every hour of this game is filled with curated and active content. If you liked Increlution before, you will love this game, and if you were like me and hated Increlution before, you will still probably have a great time with this one. On the surface, it seems pretty absurd that gameplay that is pretty much just waiting for progress bars to fill up would be so engaging, or "active" but Terraformental has the chops to pull it off, and it works surprisingly well.
The gameplay itself is pretty simple. The core mechanic is that you are stuck in a timeloop and the only thing that sticks around is knowledge, both in the form of your character learning things like passwords, maps, secrets and skills, and also in the form of you yourself learning and formulating the best routes to most efficiently exploit and make use of your limited resources. Additionally, every time your character completes an action, they gain some familiarity for that action (and possibly for similar actions too), which will make them do it slightly faster next time up to a certain limit, saving you time and other basic resources.
This brings us to the other main part of the game, the resources. As is standard with timeloop games, you only have a limited amount of various resources, such as food, water, air, and power, with all of these resources then being able to be further abstracted back to time itself. The goal of the game is to use these resources to gain knowledge and make progress through exploration and performing "persistent" actions that usually involve your character gaining knowledge or skills. Then, you use this knowledge to steadily uncover more resources that you can then use in turn to gain more knowledge and get even farther. It is simple stuff, but it starts to get complex as the map opens up and you are tasked with exploring ever farther from the start of the loop. There are many different locations in the game, each with their own set of resources, most of them finite. For example, a location may have an infinite supply of water, but only a finite supply of food. You can prolong the inevitable, but no loop is truly able to last forever (at least with the current level of content).
There is also a secondary challenge to resource management: your inventory. You can only hold so much of each resource at a time, and your inventory space is tied to the number of unique items you can hold. For example, even if an area has an infinite supply of water bottles, you can only hold 5 at a time and by extension only take 5 of them with you. In order to hold more water, you have to find different kinds of water items, such as water pouches. This is important because the game is not afraid to throw some pretty demanding challenges at you, and the margin for passing them can be pretty tight. Throughout the game, you will find yourself bottlenecked at various different points by each of the 4 main resources of food, water, air, and power. To overcome these bottlenecks, you either have to find a way to do the task faster, such as through familiarity, or find a better route, such as by taking a detour in order to find unique items that may be off the beaten path.
Complementing this already very respectable gameplay is what is easily the best story to be found in any short or medium incremental out there, perhaps even just any incremental period. While I think that Orb of Creation and Stuck in Time have more compelling gameplay compared to Terraformental, they both combined couldn't hold a candle to the story found here. It is a smooth and cool sci-fi mystery story, and there is a lot of it! Even though the planet you are on is still basically just a cold dead rock, the world still feels lived in by its comparatively small skeleton crew of corporate workers who were making it habitable. Each facility has its own story to tell, and the story itself adds on to every concrete reward you find, with it sometimes just straight up being the reward for exploration on its own.
Probably the best part about the story and writing though, is the character that you play as. They are an extremely reasonable, and very capable individual, just enough to feel right on the edge of heroic, while still remaining down to earth, or whatever this planet is supposed to be called (it has not been named as of yet). Your character has amnesia, but clearly remembers all of their corporate know-how, and quickly adapts to the situation like a fish in water. They have an active and interesting internal monologue, and regularly ponder to themselves about the many active mysteries in the game or plan around their current circumstances. They are very human, being annoyed by unforeseen problems and setbacks, while also appreciating conveniences and unexpected fortune. They have their own "private" humor that one would expect someone with only themselves for company to develop, and are overall just a really compelling character on their own.
Lastly, Terraformental has a very decent soundtrack. Each area has its own music, and while each track is perhaps a bit basic in a vacuum, they all combine perfectly to work together and it really nails that cold, sci-fi vibe that Terraformental is looking for. While I don't think that I would want to listen to it outside of the game, in game, I never found it unpleasant throughout my 44 hours of gameplay, and I think that it greatly enhanced the experience overall.
Overall, at the time of writing this review, I think that you would be pretty hard pressed to find an upcoming incremental that has more potential than this one, its just that good. Be warned that you might have to give it a bit of grace with each new update until it finishes, as the new content can sometimes be very buggy, to the point where the game might be unplayable for a few days while they fix the bugs. Other than that though, if there was any new incremental to try, this one would be it! You are very unlikely to regret it.
