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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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.