I love Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours quite a bit on their technical and design merits; a blend of idle game and adventure game, where you build up your abilities through "time spend" choices. I think this one is better than Cultist Sim in many respects too.
Unfortunately they are almost always too finicky on either side. The fiction is so overwritten and florid in the precise way which is fun in doses but lacks the direct punch you want for continued exposure. There's also almost no incentive to read all this fiction floating by, because you have to be juggling ten things and also thinking four steps ahead. Who has time to read this shit?
So you're left with the raw idle / crafter treadmill, where you optimize your resources so you can move on to greener pastures. This game is better in some ways on that front, in that items are actually unique and interesting things you see in the world and interact with. But it's often annoying trying to hunt down an item of a specific type-combination (say, Sky Forge Tool) and the interface is only partially "there" in terms of helping.
This is worst when you are trying to do something precise. You can't do the search-highlight across a specified quality combination using a filter, you have to manually and slowly search the whole property by swapping which quality your mouse is over in a tooltip. It's fucking agonizing.
On the shelf it goes. Maybe I can come back when other people have fixed this game's interface woes, just like its predecessor. Also the guy who writes this stuff is annoying and I would like to see this style of game in a better writer's hands.
Actually that's probably Pentiment lol
Unfortunately they are almost always too finicky on either side. The fiction is so overwritten and florid in the precise way which is fun in doses but lacks the direct punch you want for continued exposure. There's also almost no incentive to read all this fiction floating by, because you have to be juggling ten things and also thinking four steps ahead. Who has time to read this shit?
So you're left with the raw idle / crafter treadmill, where you optimize your resources so you can move on to greener pastures. This game is better in some ways on that front, in that items are actually unique and interesting things you see in the world and interact with. But it's often annoying trying to hunt down an item of a specific type-combination (say, Sky Forge Tool) and the interface is only partially "there" in terms of helping.
This is worst when you are trying to do something precise. You can't do the search-highlight across a specified quality combination using a filter, you have to manually and slowly search the whole property by swapping which quality your mouse is over in a tooltip. It's fucking agonizing.
On the shelf it goes. Maybe I can come back when other people have fixed this game's interface woes, just like its predecessor. Also the guy who writes this stuff is annoying and I would like to see this style of game in a better writer's hands.
Actually that's probably Pentiment lol