Oh this looks rad. I’m trying the demo; I’ll report back.
EDIT: Alright, I’ve put two hours into the demo and I think I have a decent idea of what’s going on. Here’s a brief list of small first impressions:
I like the text chirp
The writing is cute sometimes.
The sprites are cute.
The music is good and used well.
The game is extremely active (in the standard mode).
The three minigames you start with aren’t very fun.
Longer thoughts:
So, here’s the basic structure of the game (at the start): you’re surrounded by darkness you clear by doing jrpg battles. You get stronger in the jrpg battles by giving a certain amount of fish, apples, or rocks to your grandma’s cauldron. You play the minigames to get more of its corresponding resource, buy upgrades, do better, give grandma more apples, clear more darkness, and find new stuff.
The minigames keep track of your five highest scores, which are then used for the automatic resource harvesting (what I would call the only idle portion of the standard mode). It’s very slow, but it automatically collects the average of your five best scores. So you’re not necessarily grinding the minigames so much as periodically trying to improve your average.
I dunno if I’ll buy it but I’m going to play the demo some more.
Oh! One other thing: I keep referring to standard mode because the game has something like eight modes, one of them a purely idle mode. It seems like the overall goal of the game is to clear all the modes, maybe?
agreed! It is a small thing, but they’ve hit on a rather pleasing sound for it.
I kinda like the digging one, and the fish is ok. The apples is not fun, I’ll agree. I need about 1000% movement speed, I feel. (there’s move speed upgrades, so perhaps that actually gets solved down the line)
I uncovered a little bit of the darkness, and have found two extra party members (the frog and the tanky guy). I probably need to spend some time in green/“normal” combat rather than just cyan/“easy”, because I haven’t really felt all that engaged in the combat systems yet.
I feel like there is the potential to be enough here to hook me, and the demo looks to be rather generous so I’ll probably go back in for another go.
I really love the ones that build and build upon its mechanics until it reaches peak lunacy like candy box and cookie clicker. I haven’t found one of those in a while
I broke the barrier in Cauldron which is where the demo finally cuts you off. I played this for 7 hours, so it’s an extremely generous demo.
This game is intimidating. It has a lot of stuff. Maybe too much stuff. I found the fourth minigame and it’s just vampire survivors. All of the everything has so many upgrades, the battles take time, clearing out the darkness takes time. It’s a lot and I only got to the first big milestone. There’s a fifth minigame out there.
There’s too many of them, but the battles do eventually get tactically interesting. Around level 200 or so is when I’d say they started forcing me to think about team comp and stuff. The final boss before breaking the barrier was a long drawn out fight that I completed on hard and it was a pretty satisfying fight.
I’m kind of scared of how much time I could dedicate to Cauldron in a totally non-passive way.
Woof… playing Cauldron for me was like boofing Stardew Valley, and not in a good way (and let’s just agree to agree that "boofing Stardew Valley" is an at least value neutral statement).
The little games are a little too, well, little, and though they seem to bloom into something more interesting after the first little while, they kinda stop blooming into anything more than that.
I also feel like the upgrades eventually do less to expand the games in question, and instead do more to just make the games kind of a solved problem. The strategy to any of them melts away into just having enough upgrades to trivialize the challenge of the games. The Vampire Survivors rip-off feels especially hollow after you get enough upgrades, and it’s auto-playing behaviour which you can witness after clearing your first game mode kind of tells on itself in that way. Like, come on, couldn’t you have ripped off Vampire Survivors just a little more, if you’re already ripping it off conceptually? Same with the RPG battles too, I’m afraid. They don’t really have tactical depth, once you are strong enough.
I don’t want to say I’m upset I paid 20 bucks for it, I mean, I did still play a good amount of it, but damn, it made me sympathize a little more with the folks in here talkin’ about how these games have a life-ruining quality to them lol.