-Remove the "Current playtime of 2-6 hours" cause that's just a plain lie at this point 🙈 (I've been at it for much longer)
-Give us the power to shuffle skills around, so that we can more effectively use formations, especially the first one.
And to also avoid problems like (complain incoming) unlocking lockpicking suddenly making metal farming incredibly annoying, and inefficient to automate.
(Can no longer boost both ether and mining at the same time (with the 1st Formation) due to a 2 skill space being created cause of lockpicking. 😥)
-Giving us the option to "militarise" Rounders other than Alpha and Delta would be convenient (don't understand why we can't in the first place?)
+ 2 small bugs:
-When you "Approach the Glow" then "Return to Asteroid Belt", redoing "Approach the Glow" a second time no longer updates the background (it's stuck on the default full Propulse / Return to Asteroid Belt one.)
-Buying back the Asteroid Formation from an Teal Asteroid made Spinforge doesn't put back the option to buy regular Deltas.
+ 1 big bug:
-Just discovered that rose coins (all kinds) can just magically merge with the background, destroying the coin in the process. (proof of destruction: can't be used in the shop)
I seem to have a phantom rounder. When I had a delta, a gamma, a beta, and an alpha, it said I had 5 rounders.. I then used all of my rounders, and the display still said 1 rounder. Refreshing the page did not solve the issue.
EDIT: I found it by zooming IN of all things. There should probably be a confined area where rounders can spawn, rather than whatever caused this weird phantom rounder.
Is this supposed to take several months to get started too? I've tried levelling my skills and upgrading my rounders all the way to unlocking propulsion but I'm nowhere near able to complete that. Some comment mentioned formation and I have zero idea of what they're talking about.
Play your rounds in the propulsion skill (or preception, I'm not sure). When you reach prestige 1, it will release the formation button, which will release an empty formation stone. When you insert 3 red rounds, it activates. It accumulates XP when placed in up to 3 skills. When it reaches its maximum, it can give a 4x skill speed boost.
Regardless of the skill, it collects XP at the same speed, so use the time it takes to maximize your rounds. After maximizing them, go after the strange stone to increase the round limit (you may need to sacrifice rounds again to reach it). Then, maximize your rounds again and sacrifice them to reach the star. Then, release the reducers, which are actions that reduce the time it takes to perform travel actions, such as polpusion, by 10% (for each time I did this, I managed to reduce it from 1,000 to a little over 300, using my rounds in the first 4 or 5 trips). And that's when I stopped and closed it, and came back today to find out that it didn't save my game.
NOTE: ALL THE TRANSLATION OF MY COMMENT WAS DONE BY GOOGLE TRANSLATOR, MY ENGLISH IS VERY POOR.
found a glitch where for some reason after i used the very first rounder i found it still said i had it even though I didn't, had to wipe progress and completely restart
Used it by dragging it over ether gathering , at first I ran It on Firefox first then switched to chrome to see if that would fix it but i had to wipe data in order for it to fix itself.
It would be nice if the Almanac order wasn't just alphabetical. As it stands the first six rounders go Alpha>Beta>Delta>Epsilon>Gamma>Zeta, but it would be a lot easier to read if it went Alpha>Beta>Gamma>Delta>Epsilon>Zeta (Ascending order of value)
This can almost be played on mobile. The buttons are rather small and it can be difficult to grab a core from the edge of the screen, but the real problem is that you cannot open the Spin-forge.
I was able to reach the Sun, but not being able to Forge makes it impossible to make more than one Zeta to push forward.
How do you get Rose's contact item? I seem to have hit a wall here and cannot figure out what I'm missing. Ramos implies she can get me in touch with others but that dialog seems to be a dead end and there's nothing in her shop.
I'm stuck after unlocking the shackle, and repeating it just gives me me currency that doesn't do anything since I can infinitely buy Formation Smashers for seemingly no cost. I've tried getting every duration of shackle, getting no shackle, nothing seems to give me anything new.
An update changed the way forge recipes worked, and wiped out the Rose contact item. If you refresh the page, it should be available under Ramos' Branch. Thank you for playing.
I'm divided on this one. Those two clues plus the demonstrated cycles might be enough to clue the player in on the rest of the cycle, but that might be more obtuse than fun to figure out.
I'm assuming its A<B<C..etc[loop where F=A] (If that's not the case, then it might need an additional hint) would be nice if it mentioned type advantage was 1.5X, as it does mention the black white type advantage was 2X/0.5X. I'm also just assuming the above from observation, so a confirmation when talking about it with rose would be nice.
I've been having a lot of fun with this so far! There aren't many games that fill this sort of puzzley incremental genre, so I appreciate when a new one appears. Keep up the great work!
i think its a good idea but its WAY to punishing for trying things. i tried to push for the 3rd green thing to see if i could and there goes maybe 20-30 minutes of progress for almost no benefit aside from knowing to not do that again.
idgi. What's the point of having a recipe for a spinforge formation, and then just have it punish you for putting the only thing that can be put in, put in. Especially when the description is "different rounders give different recipes" "Probably shouldn't have done that"
I guess it really is just a brute force to complete, despite what the description says.
I don't see any other clues to make a puzzle out of let alone a solution.
It feels really punishing to try to experiment and figure things out early on. Kinda the opposite of the vibe I think you'd want for a puzzle game. The randomness of alphas really doesn't help.
Played this for an hour or so and I got frustrated with my inability to progress D: I got to the point where I had all five rounders, but even if I shoved them all into skills I couldn't finish the Propulse task. Building them back up took too long and I got bored, sorry.
Can someone ELI5 how I can progress? I got 5 rounders merged as far as possible I have "The first formation" with all red alphas (and no idea what it actually does) Ether gethering 19 Meditation 24 Patience 27 Perception 14 Propulsion 14
I can sacrefice he rounders to reach the the next stage via propulsion but then I am pretty much stuck? I can farm a single asteroid.
Am I missing something?This game is supposed to take 2-6 hurs, feels like I spent more thant that already
I'm genuinely so lost on what the hell I'm supposed to do once the blue button pops up. I feel like I've been doing the same shit for eons, but the description says that's incorrect, but there's seemingly no other way to finish the blue button.
Yeah, I managed to figure that out, only to run out of time and then be unable to get back because I'd made that sacrifice. It feels really punishing, in a bad way, and I had to set it down after that because I felt so much like my time had been wasted.
really liked it. i know a lot of people are telling you tutorialize everything but i would consider holding off. because yeah, i didn't immediately know how everything worked, but i kinda liked that.
Sorry to do this, but this game is incredibly obtuse in ways that feel like they waste your time.
There's really no clue or hint that you can combine alphas to make other rounders. Nor is there any clue that some items need to be right clicked to do anything. Which then meant I spent a lot of time trying to right click unclickable items, or merge unmergeable items (and there's a lot of items you can buy duplicates of which don't seem to offer any advantages).
The permanently escalating costs on the spin forge feel very punishing. If you buy a bunch of Epsilons, to get 5x Zeta + 1x Epsilon to max your time allotment for a run, then you subsequently spend any rounders on exp or need to backtrack to lower tier rounders (for whatever reason) then to max your time again next time it will cost much more. Buying spin forges also seems like an incredibly costly trap option. I bought a second spin forge, the only things I could slot into it were the same rounders I used on my first spin forge. Which then gave me a duplicate spin forge with exactly the same forge options, which is not very useful. "you used the same components what did you think would happen?" Well the game has untelegraphed merge mechanics so it wasn't unreasonable for me to think it might do something and you get the spin forge purchase option long before you get alternative components for most of the slots. Then I made a third spin forge, tried slotting the shiny asteroid in the teal slot, which let me produce a shiny asteroid. EXACTLY ONCE. Then the option disappeared, so it was effectively another wasted spinforge because it lost the teal slot forge option and had the exact same crafts in other slots.
And the automation options feel very unwieldy. Firstly they break after a limited number of uses, so they're not really unreliable. Next it was very counter-inutive to me that you click-drag them to an action to assign them, but you don't click-drag to unassign them and instead you click the action. Next there's no bulk on-off toggle for automation - if I want to put 50 gears on something so it runs for a long time then short actions might run out before I finish placing all the gears.
And I really had no idea what to do after killing the orb, escaping solitary and interacting with the community.
I could kill the orb again, but why would that be different from before? Communicating with the orb is 20x the difficulty of destroying it, and destroying it is already annoying so it seems like a very annoying route to try. And I've exhausted every other area action.
The only other things to do are interacting with the other immortals, but I didn't seem able to really do anything with them either.
Kludge gave me a Scarab. Ramos gives you items to contact the others. Couldn't find anything more to do with either of those.
I can get Drop pods from Rose, which accept "MILITARY" category items. Which for some reason doesn't seem to include soldiers nor helmets and I couldn't find any use for the drop pods. Nor could I find any use for the soliders themselves. It seems like the soliders need a formation to do anything, but the only formation I found was the first formation which I already used on alpha rounders. And it seemed very easy to miss the soldiers anyway because you can only get them by merging alphas with helmets, and by the time you start getting helmets you might not have any free rounder slots and you can directly gather betas anyway. Note that the merge is specifically alphas with helmets - the other way round (trying to put a helmet on an alpha) doesn't work. Rose can send you rifts, but I couldn't find any way to interact with them, and sometimes the rolling rift obscures action boxes and makes them unclickable. The soldiers also seem like poor options in the spin forge as well. I spent 250 metal on the forge, +60 metal +2 potential slotting a bravo, +120 metal + 4 potential slotting a charlie, + 240 metal + 8 potential slotting a delta + 30 metal slotting a helmet. Total cost = 700 metal cost. I can then buy a delta for 120 metal + 8 potential. BUT the cost increases by +25% per purchase. So if you're buying one of each with that setup the per unit costs scale faster than you recoup your 670 initial cost investment. I haven't verified that soldier costs scale infinitely, but the normal rounders seem too and maybe the helmet is screwing things up a bit. Okay spinforge means you don't need to keep a rounder slot free to farm alphas to turn into soldiers
With Spinforge
Without spinforge
700 initial cost
Number
Bravo
Charlie
Delta
Helmet
Total
Bravo
Charlie
Delta
Helmet
Total
1
30
60
120
30
940
60
120
240
30
450
2
37.5
75
150
30
1232.5
60
120
240
30
900
3
46.875
93.75
187.5
30
1590.625
60
120
240
30
1350
4
58.59375
117.1875
234.375
30
2030.78125
60
120
240
30
1800
5
73.2421875
146.484375
292.96875
30
2573.476563
60
120
240
30
2250
The Adjudicator sells you formation smashers to reset formations, but they don't seem to work on spin forge formations nor the first formation. Maybe they work on the scarab beetle or the asteroid formation, but I was happy with what I had in those so that didn't seem useful. It also wasn't clear to me what currency was used to buy these.
Thanks for the in-depth review! A lot of your UI bits are spot-on, and are on my list. We've got to get right-click hover icons and things like that in. There's so much that we've come to expect in an interface that all has to be put in manually! I tried out like 5 different ways of doing drag-and-drop before settling on this one. UI developers have my respect.
I have some thoughts on the cost scaling, but adjusting that is further down on the list than needed QoL changes.
The different NPC contact items will have more uses later on.
The military parts aren't very flushed-out right now. That update should come in the next few days (2025-09-05). The costs on those are meant to scale up, but there's another item coming in later to help with that. I may disable the scaling until that update is in.
The bug with the formation smasher has been fixed for the next update, it should work with any formation you put rounders into, so that you can see how it works with different rounders.
I appreciate your time, thank you so much for playing! There's more to come and I'm working to make the experience less frustrating while still keeping the puzzling aspects.
Game is fun, but yeah it does seem quite cryptic. For a puzzle game it also seems shockingly luck based. I don't mind that, but i figured i'd mention it.
An intriguing game. I'm a little slow at this, so I'm still working on how to complete propulsion. I have an alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and epsilon particle, so it seems like this is the maximum time I can have. My rock formation doesn't seem to do much.
Whelp, I communicated with the orb. It didn't say anything.
My positive feelings for the game rather drained by the end, I hate to say it, but I credit that to the incomplete nature of the current stage I suspect.
Wow, good work getting that far. There's a lot of early-game stuff it seems like I need to get squared away before working on the next features. Thank you for playing!
I have 5 spin-forges and they still feel almost completely useless. I merged military-Epsilon with military-Epsilon and they just deleted themselves. Formation-Breakers don't seem to do anything. Military doesn't go into the drop-pod? I'm so lost. It feels like the game is broken.
It feels broken because you've hit the edge of what's there for now. (2025-09-03) Yeah, those bits are broken atm, there should be a fix out in a day or two, depending on my class schedule. Thank you for playing up to this point!
Nice game! I was also confused by the merging of rounders, but since it's a puzzle game I wouldn't say tooltips are the silver bullet. The commenter that mentioned tutorialization might have the right idea...
i enjoy this game a lot so far, though i also 100% agree that not enough hints were given on merging rounders, on right clicking spinforge etc... by the way what is this automation gear ten pack supposed to do other than require resources and then spinning for some moments? oh it created gears i can pull onto actions, alright got it. also why does the gear on collect alpha disappear after some actions?why is the way to open the book by double clicking and opening the spinforge by right clicking? just make both double click that next zone button is quiet hard and getting the spinforge formation is way too much grind. who wants to grind 250metal by stopping at the right timing on finding asteroids and then move the formation to mine them each run for 10runs or so?
spinforge formation=spinforge no2? wow that was a waste of resources and effort
it also feels like one is punished to experiment with rounders as the costs in the shop increase more and more :/
after throwing all my zetas at propulsion, which left me devoid of any time in my future runs......i decided to stop playing. communicating or destroying or whatever, but regrinding those rounders is something i abhor way too much to keep playing.
conclusion: i think this is a great game already and it will be even better in the future. it needs some more fine tuning though and more explanations and really something to make this rounder grind more bearable
I appreciate the review! I'm pulling a ton of great advice from people, and stuff like "I felt frustrated at x point" is really helpful for time tuning. There's a lot more content planned, and balancing tends to get lost as the scope increases.
As some other people have hinted at, this could really do with some clearer tutorialisation/indicators on how rounders work. I thought the game was really boring and uninteractive until I looked at the comments and saw that I could merge and drop them.
Also I think time should stop when something new pops up (or at least have that as an option). If I'm meditating and I get a charge on "Collect Alpha" then I want to use that charge before time runs out rather than continue meditating.
Finally I think that the button layout could use some work, the layout shifting around when new buttons appear isn't great in my opinion.
That's supposed to be some constructive criticism, having fun with the game so far.
Merging rounders is good for a while then bad? 1+1=2.5 (+25%) 2.5+2.5=5.25 (+5%) 5.25+5.25=10 (-5%) 10+10=17 (-15%) Why am I being punished!
Edit: That said, it's a cool game. It does a great job piquing the players curiosity. It's just that playing it takes a lot of experimentation, and experimentation is often punished.
Since you have limited slots for rounders, merging at higher levels is still going to increase the max amount of extra time you can store. It's just that merging the lower levels is super efficient and you should do that first until you run out of space.
Edit: higher level rounders also give more xp when dropped on a skill. Gamma = 65 xp, Delta = 165xp
Ooh, this seems interesting. I'm gonna add onto or edit this comment every once in a while as I go through this, if I have anything to mention. To begin, unless I just missed it, there seems to be little to no indication that you can merge the rounders to enhance them. This resulted in me spending a while at the beginning of the game with only 5 reds, requiring more manual intervention & decreasing exp potential.
Addon 1: The Propulse action removes the wait & perceive actions. While this does imply that it is eventually able to be used as soon as you begin a run, the action does not list that variable unlock requirement (as opposed to meditate, showing both ways to have it appear). Additionally, I've had a 'spinforge' for a while. It does not explain what it can be used for. The same goes for formation shards and metals, though I think I just haven't gotten enough of them to unlock any related actions. - So, I just right clicked the spinforge. On accident. I've been brute forcing my way through to the third area. The spinforge allows you to spend time turning currency into things, most importantly *automation*. As it turns out, you are not supposed to be doing all of this manually.
Addon 2: Meditate is not quite as infinite as stated...
Yeah, that could be a lot more clear. I plan on adding a tip system that pops up after a player is at a progression gate for a while. Thank you for playing, and the comment!
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Been having fun playing through it!
Beware of Spoilers!
Though, 3 suggestions:
-Remove the "Current playtime of 2-6 hours" cause that's just a plain lie at this point 🙈 (I've been at it for much longer)
-Give us the power to shuffle skills around, so that we can more effectively use formations, especially the first one.
And to also avoid problems like (complain incoming) unlocking lockpicking suddenly making metal farming incredibly annoying, and inefficient to automate.
(Can no longer boost both ether and mining at the same time (with the 1st Formation) due to a 2 skill space being created cause of lockpicking. 😥)
-Giving us the option to "militarise" Rounders other than Alpha and Delta would be convenient (don't understand why we can't in the first place?)
+ 2 small bugs:
-When you "Approach the Glow" then "Return to Asteroid Belt", redoing "Approach the Glow" a second time no longer updates the background (it's stuck on the default full Propulse / Return to Asteroid Belt one.)
-Buying back the Asteroid Formation from an Teal Asteroid made Spinforge doesn't put back the option to buy regular Deltas.
+ 1 big bug:
-Just discovered that rose coins (all kinds) can just magically merge with the background, destroying the coin in the process. (proof of destruction: can't be used in the shop)
(lost all my coins from that...)
Other than that, I approve!
Thanks for playing! Good point on the playtime. There is a way to move skills now, it was added with the last update.
The rounders that can be militarized are the ones that have the same title in the Greek and NATO alphabet.
Background management is planned, it's an absolute bear.
I'm not happy with how the asteroid is handled yet.
The "merge with nothing" bug is fixed now. It was a result of the dragged item attempting to merge with the faded shadow where it used to be.
Combat seems to be bugged, twice now I've fought a rift and the rift survived with negative Power. Attacking it again properly defeats it.
I seem to have a phantom rounder. When I had a delta, a gamma, a beta, and an alpha, it said I had 5 rounders.. I then used all of my rounders, and the display still said 1 rounder. Refreshing the page did not solve the issue.
EDIT: I found it by zooming IN of all things. There should probably be a confined area where rounders can spawn, rather than whatever caused this weird phantom rounder.
Odd. There's a bit more content planned before I tackle UI again. An option to auto-sort all items is in the works. Thank you for playing!
Is this supposed to take several months to get started too? I've tried levelling my skills and upgrading my rounders all the way to unlocking propulsion but I'm nowhere near able to complete that. Some comment mentioned formation and I have zero idea of what they're talking about.
Play your rounds in the propulsion skill (or preception, I'm not sure). When you reach prestige 1, it will release the formation button, which will release an empty formation stone. When you insert 3 red rounds, it activates. It accumulates XP when placed in up to 3 skills. When it reaches its maximum, it can give a 4x skill speed boost.
Regardless of the skill, it collects XP at the same speed, so use the time it takes to maximize your rounds. After maximizing them, go after the strange stone to increase the round limit (you may need to sacrifice rounds again to reach it). Then, maximize your rounds again and sacrifice them to reach the star. Then, release the reducers, which are actions that reduce the time it takes to perform travel actions, such as polpusion, by 10% (for each time I did this, I managed to reduce it from 1,000 to a little over 300, using my rounds in the first 4 or 5 trips). And that's when I stopped and closed it, and came back today to find out that it didn't save my game.
NOTE: ALL THE TRANSLATION OF MY COMMENT WAS DONE BY GOOGLE TRANSLATOR, MY ENGLISH IS VERY POOR.
found a glitch where for some reason after i used the very first rounder i found it still said i had it even though I didn't, had to wipe progress and completely restart
How did you use the rounder, and what browser were you using? It's possible for things to end up offscreen, I'm still working on that.
Used it by dragging it over ether gathering , at first I ran It on Firefox first then switched to chrome to see if that would fix it but i had to wipe data in order for it to fix itself.
really fun, i managed to get the ether gathering to 125x and harvested potential at the speed of light
It would be nice if the Almanac order wasn't just alphabetical. As it stands the first six rounders go Alpha>Beta>Delta>Epsilon>Gamma>Zeta, but it would be a lot easier to read if it went Alpha>Beta>Gamma>Delta>Epsilon>Zeta (Ascending order of value)
That was meant to be the case. Fixed in next update. Thank you for playing!
This can almost be played on mobile. The buttons are rather small and it can be difficult to grab a core from the edge of the screen, but the real problem is that you cannot open the Spin-forge.
I was able to reach the Sun, but not being able to Forge makes it impossible to make more than one Zeta to push forward.
I accidentally put the the thing that gives +1 rounds in the spinforge and now it's gone, I'm not sure if that's intentional.
Better controls for mobile would be appreciated.
Overall a really interesting concept that needs alot of tuning and calibrating
uh idk what to do with the first formation, it isn't gaining any xp, and my propulsion doesn't have enough time to finish
AHA I figured it out. so close to finishing propulsion
How do you get Rose's contact item? I seem to have hit a wall here and cannot figure out what I'm missing. Ramos implies she can get me in touch with others but that dialog seems to be a dead end and there's nothing in her shop.
I'm stuck after unlocking the shackle, and repeating it just gives me me currency that doesn't do anything since I can infinitely buy Formation Smashers for seemingly no cost. I've tried getting every duration of shackle, getting no shackle, nothing seems to give me anything new.
An update changed the way forge recipes worked, and wiped out the Rose contact item. If you refresh the page, it should be available under Ramos' Branch. Thank you for playing.
We're told combat is cyclical, but not given any clues as to which colors apart from blue/red are where in the cycle. This is Not Good.
I'm divided on this one. Those two clues plus the demonstrated cycles might be enough to clue the player in on the rest of the cycle, but that might be more obtuse than fun to figure out.
I'm assuming its A<B<C..etc[loop where F=A] (If that's not the case, then it might need an additional hint) would be nice if it mentioned type advantage was 1.5X, as it does mention the black white type advantage was 2X/0.5X. I'm also just assuming the above from observation, so a confirmation when talking about it with rose would be nice.
I've been having a lot of fun with this so far! There aren't many games that fill this sort of puzzley incremental genre, so I appreciate when a new one appears.
Keep up the great work!
can you change the interact to only two left click and not right then left
i think its a good idea but its WAY to punishing for trying things. i tried to push for the 3rd green thing to see if i could and there goes maybe 20-30 minutes of progress for almost no benefit aside from knowing to not do that again.
I need UI scaling. I'm using a laptop with high resolution and currently texts are too small for me.
I'll add it to the list, but it will probably be a while. UI is not my specialty, so maintaining functionality while adding scaling will be tricky.
idgi. What's the point of having a recipe for a spinforge formation, and then just have it punish you for putting the only thing that can be put in, put in.
Especially when the description is "different rounders give different recipes"
"Probably shouldn't have done that"
I guess it really is just a brute force to complete, despite what the description says.
I don't see any other clues to make a puzzle out of let alone a solution.
It feels really punishing to try to experiment and figure things out early on. Kinda the opposite of the vibe I think you'd want for a puzzle game. The randomness of alphas really doesn't help.
Played this for an hour or so and I got frustrated with my inability to progress D: I got to the point where I had all five rounders, but even if I shoved them all into skills I couldn't finish the Propulse task. Building them back up took too long and I got bored, sorry.
put the formation thing over a skill try meditate its not even introduced to you sadly and I had to figure it out myself
Can someone ELI5 how I can progress? I got 5 rounders merged as far as possible
I have "The first formation" with all red alphas (and no idea what it actually does)
Ether gethering 19
Meditation 24
Patience 27
Perception 14
Propulsion 14
I can sacrefice he rounders to reach the the next stage via propulsion but then I am pretty much stuck? I can farm a single asteroid.
Am I missing something?This game is supposed to take 2-6 hurs, feels like I spent more thant that already
You can place the first formation on top of the skills and level it up. Then it will boost the effects of each skill it's on.
It can overlap and effect two skills at once
It can cover 3 skills if you're precise.
ooooooh thats what it means by overlapping skills
How do you increase the storage? I've placed it on a skill and tried various things but it remains at 0 and does nothing.
Oh! I see, I misunderstood and put it over an action instead. That makes sense, thank you.
I was confused for a while because epsilon doesn't look that green.
Yeah, I'm pretty colorblind. That may be part of a cleanup pass later on. Thank you for playing!
Hang on, you can ask Adjudicator for a new handbook when you finish it...but finishing the handbook destroys it, preventing you from asking them?
...you're right about that. Putting it on the list!
I just thought it was a joke :)
I'm genuinely so lost on what the hell I'm supposed to do once the blue button pops up. I feel like I've been doing the same shit for eons, but the description says that's incorrect, but there's seemingly no other way to finish the blue button.
You can brute force it, but it will take some time. You can also sacrifice something dear and achieve success immediately.
Yeah, I managed to figure that out, only to run out of time and then be unable to get back because I'd made that sacrifice. It feels really punishing, in a bad way, and I had to set it down after that because I felt so much like my time had been wasted.
The one bit of tutorialization I feel is needed is to tell us to right click the spinforge. Aside from that, merging is pretty intuitive.
Totally agree. Working on a hover icon for things that can be clicked/right-clicked now!
How do we Approach the Glow?
Or should I be farming the Asteroids more? (I got the shiny one already)
Progress sometimes requires sacrifice.
really liked it. i know a lot of people are telling you tutorialize everything but i would consider holding off. because yeah, i didn't immediately know how everything worked, but i kinda liked that.
Sorry to do this, but this game is incredibly obtuse in ways that feel like they waste your time.
There's really no clue or hint that you can combine alphas to make other rounders. Nor is there any clue that some items need to be right clicked to do anything. Which then meant I spent a lot of time trying to right click unclickable items, or merge unmergeable items (and there's a lot of items you can buy duplicates of which don't seem to offer any advantages).
The permanently escalating costs on the spin forge feel very punishing. If you buy a bunch of Epsilons, to get 5x Zeta + 1x Epsilon to max your time allotment for a run, then you subsequently spend any rounders on exp or need to backtrack to lower tier rounders (for whatever reason) then to max your time again next time it will cost much more. Buying spin forges also seems like an incredibly costly trap option.
I bought a second spin forge, the only things I could slot into it were the same rounders I used on my first spin forge. Which then gave me a duplicate spin forge with exactly the same forge options, which is not very useful. "you used the same components what did you think would happen?" Well the game has untelegraphed merge mechanics so it wasn't unreasonable for me to think it might do something and you get the spin forge purchase option long before you get alternative components for most of the slots. Then I made a third spin forge, tried slotting the shiny asteroid in the teal slot, which let me produce a shiny asteroid. EXACTLY ONCE. Then the option disappeared, so it was effectively another wasted spinforge because it lost the teal slot forge option and had the exact same crafts in other slots.
And the automation options feel very unwieldy. Firstly they break after a limited number of uses, so they're not really unreliable. Next it was very counter-inutive to me that you click-drag them to an action to assign them, but you don't click-drag to unassign them and instead you click the action. Next there's no bulk on-off toggle for automation - if I want to put 50 gears on something so it runs for a long time then short actions might run out before I finish placing all the gears.
And I really had no idea what to do after killing the orb, escaping solitary and interacting with the community.
I could kill the orb again, but why would that be different from before? Communicating with the orb is 20x the difficulty of destroying it, and destroying it is already annoying so it seems like a very annoying route to try. And I've exhausted every other area action.
The only other things to do are interacting with the other immortals, but I didn't seem able to really do anything with them either.
Kludge gave me a Scarab.
Ramos gives you items to contact the others.
Couldn't find anything more to do with either of those.
I can get Drop pods from Rose, which accept "MILITARY" category items. Which for some reason doesn't seem to include soldiers nor helmets and I couldn't find any use for the drop pods. Nor could I find any use for the soliders themselves. It seems like the soliders need a formation to do anything, but the only formation I found was the first formation which I already used on alpha rounders. And it seemed very easy to miss the soldiers anyway because you can only get them by merging alphas with helmets, and by the time you start getting helmets you might not have any free rounder slots and you can directly gather betas anyway. Note that the merge is specifically alphas with helmets - the other way round (trying to put a helmet on an alpha) doesn't work. Rose can send you rifts, but I couldn't find any way to interact with them, and sometimes the rolling rift obscures action boxes and makes them unclickable. The soldiers also seem like poor options in the spin forge as well. I spent 250 metal on the forge, +60 metal +2 potential slotting a bravo, +120 metal + 4 potential slotting a charlie, + 240 metal + 8 potential slotting a delta + 30 metal slotting a helmet. Total cost = 700 metal cost. I can then buy a delta for 120 metal + 8 potential. BUT the cost increases by +25% per purchase. So if you're buying one of each with that setup the per unit costs scale faster than you recoup your 670 initial cost investment. I haven't verified that soldier costs scale infinitely, but the normal rounders seem too and maybe the helmet is screwing things up a bit. Okay spinforge means you don't need to keep a rounder slot free to farm alphas to turn into soldiers
The Adjudicator sells you formation smashers to reset formations, but they don't seem to work on spin forge formations nor the first formation. Maybe they work on the scarab beetle or the asteroid formation, but I was happy with what I had in those so that didn't seem useful. It also wasn't clear to me what currency was used to buy these.
Thanks for the in-depth review! A lot of your UI bits are spot-on, and are on my list. We've got to get right-click hover icons and things like that in. There's so much that we've come to expect in an interface that all has to be put in manually! I tried out like 5 different ways of doing drag-and-drop before settling on this one. UI developers have my respect.
I have some thoughts on the cost scaling, but adjusting that is further down on the list than needed QoL changes.
The different NPC contact items will have more uses later on.
The military parts aren't very flushed-out right now. That update should come in the next few days (2025-09-05). The costs on those are meant to scale up, but there's another item coming in later to help with that. I may disable the scaling until that update is in.
The bug with the formation smasher has been fixed for the next update, it should work with any formation you put rounders into, so that you can see how it works with different rounders.
I appreciate your time, thank you so much for playing! There's more to come and I'm working to make the experience less frustrating while still keeping the puzzling aspects.
Game is fun, but yeah it does seem quite cryptic. For a puzzle game it also seems shockingly luck based. I don't mind that, but i figured i'd mention it.
An intriguing game. I'm a little slow at this, so I'm still working on how to complete propulsion. I have an alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and epsilon particle, so it seems like this is the maximum time I can have. My rock formation doesn't seem to do much.
Whelp, I communicated with the orb. It didn't say anything.
My positive feelings for the game rather drained by the end, I hate to say it, but I credit that to the incomplete nature of the current stage I suspect.
Wow, good work getting that far. There's a lot of early-game stuff it seems like I need to get squared away before working on the next features. Thank you for playing!
Oh, and there's no way to interact with rifts, no way to make more coins?
Is that the end-game?
I have 5 spin-forges and they still feel almost completely useless. I merged military-Epsilon with military-Epsilon and they just deleted themselves. Formation-Breakers don't seem to do anything. Military doesn't go into the drop-pod?
I'm so lost. It feels like the game is broken.
It feels broken because you've hit the edge of what's there for now. (2025-09-03) Yeah, those bits are broken atm, there should be a fix out in a day or two, depending on my class schedule. Thank you for playing up to this point!
Nice game! I was also confused by the merging of rounders, but since it's a puzzle game I wouldn't say tooltips are the silver bullet. The commenter that mentioned tutorialization might have the right idea...
i enjoy this game a lot so far, though i also 100% agree that not enough hints were given on merging rounders, on right clicking spinforge etc... by the way what is this automation gear ten pack supposed to do other than require resources and then spinning for some moments? oh it created gears i can pull onto actions, alright got it.
also why does the gear on collect alpha disappear after some actions?why is the way to open the book by double clicking and opening the spinforge by right clicking? just make both double click
that next zone button is quiet hard and getting the spinforge formation is way too much grind. who wants to grind 250metal by stopping at the right timing on finding asteroids and then move the formation to mine them each run for 10runs or so?
spinforge formation=spinforge no2? wow that was a waste of resources and effort
it also feels like one is punished to experiment with rounders as the costs in the shop increase more and more :/
after throwing all my zetas at propulsion, which left me devoid of any time in my future runs......i decided to stop playing. communicating or destroying or whatever, but regrinding those rounders is something i abhor way too much to keep playing.
conclusion: i think this is a great game already and it will be even better in the future. it needs some more fine tuning though and more explanations and really something to make this rounder grind more bearable
I appreciate the review! I'm pulling a ton of great advice from people, and stuff like "I felt frustrated at x point" is really helpful for time tuning. There's a lot more content planned, and balancing tends to get lost as the scope increases.
As some other people have hinted at, this could really do with some clearer tutorialisation/indicators on how rounders work. I thought the game was really boring and uninteractive until I looked at the comments and saw that I could merge and drop them.
Also I think time should stop when something new pops up (or at least have that as an option). If I'm meditating and I get a charge on "Collect Alpha" then I want to use that charge before time runs out rather than continue meditating.
Finally I think that the button layout could use some work, the layout shifting around when new buttons appear isn't great in my opinion.
That's supposed to be some constructive criticism, having fun with the game so far.
Merging rounders is good for a while then bad? 1+1=2.5 (+25%) 2.5+2.5=5.25 (+5%) 5.25+5.25=10 (-5%) 10+10=17 (-15%) Why am I being punished!
Edit: That said, it's a cool game. It does a great job piquing the players curiosity. It's just that playing it takes a lot of experimentation, and experimentation is often punished.
Since you have limited slots for rounders, merging at higher levels is still going to increase the max amount of extra time you can store. It's just that merging the lower levels is super efficient and you should do that first until you run out of space.
Edit: higher level rounders also give more xp when dropped on a skill. Gamma = 65 xp, Delta = 165xp
i would still call it good due to the constraint of only being able to have a limited number of rounders
Ooh, this seems interesting. I'm gonna add onto or edit this comment every once in a while as I go through this, if I have anything to mention.
To begin
, unless I just missed it,there seems to be little to no indication that you can merge the rounders to enhance them. This resulted in me spending a while at the beginning of the game with only 5 reds, requiring more manual intervention & decreasing exp potential.Addon 1: The Propulse action removes the wait & perceive actions. While this does imply that it is eventually able to be used as soon as you begin a run, the action does not list that variable unlock requirement (as opposed to meditate, showing both ways to have it appear).
Additionally, I've had a 'spinforge' for a while. It does not explain what it can be used for. The same goes for formation shards and metals, though I think I just haven't gotten enough of them to unlock any related actions.
- So, I just right clicked the spinforge. On accident. I've been brute forcing my way through to the third area. The spinforge allows you to spend time turning currency into things, most importantly *automation*. As it turns out, you are not supposed to be doing all of this manually.
Addon 2: Meditate is not quite as infinite as stated...
Yeah, that could be a lot more clear. I plan on adding a tip system that pops up after a player is at a progression gate for a while. Thank you for playing, and the comment!
Oh! If I hadn't seen this comment, I would never have guessed I could do that.
Ack! This specific bug is my nemesis.