i really liked it, but it is poorly explained and primarily a puzzle game above all else.

it's super fun to carve out rivers and valleys and make hills bloom. i love optimizing the shapes and getting everything lined up. i also played on easy and didn't engage too much with the resource limitations.

it takes a couple of tries before you understand what each level is going to throw at you and how it's supposed to work. it feels weird to rationalize "we're restoring this wasteland, let's blast it to hell and then use a bunch of tech to freeze it". but i liked the way the campaign put the puzzle pieces back together in a different order (even if the logbook didn't get updated to reflect the changing missions). this is really a puzzle game first and foremost, and a message game... not at all.

it needs some qol stuff, like monotile ranges when placing rocks and some better transparency when labels are obscuring your choices. but also i just locked in and finished it in two days, so clearly it wasnt enough to stop me.

the story is incredibly limp. it's actually not interesting to watch an AI ask what nationality she is in a vacuum (although the VA does a great job chewing the scenery) and the "AI gaining consciousness" storyline hits every cliched note you'd expect.

the gameplay is mostly about worker management, but worker management mostly consists of "build more workers". there isn't too much control you have over prioritization or anything. in fact, the solution to everything is "build more". not enough raw mats? build more mines. supply chain issues? build more factories. need to start terraforming? build just.... a shitload of water treatment plants. no, more than that. an absurd amount. water levels rising? don't try and manage it, just rebuild everything (but more) on higher ground. again. again!

which finally brings us to the Pure Ideology - Oh no! Humans destroyed the Earth with their relentless pillaging of natural resources!! We must retreat to Mars to secure a future for our fourteen words, I mean -- start pillaging THESE resources, it's fine, I mean -- hey, look, it's just a game, right? Right? There's not any shoutouts to Elon Musk in here, implying he's a super genius who is going to save humanity, right? Oh. Hm.

i liked it enough to finish it, but it was kind of a hate-finish.

after getting stuck, i joined the discord and read the guide, had to decide on waiting for 4 days to gather enough of a resource to unlock something before i spend another 4 days actively grinding a resource to get a perk which won't speed up my prestiges at all but will allow me to start another prestiege that should take me, oh, about 4 days, or continuing to grind the stuff im still working on fairly actively. i am on the second prestige layer and there are probably about ten more in front of me?

i like a lot about this game - the art, the feel of the units flowing into each other, the quips, even the complexity. i do not like the pacing. i do not like how some things progress offline (waste, energy) but other things need you to be online (runes, oysters). i definitely don't like how you are punished for attempting challenges and the ruinous difficulty cliffs. i HATE how the autobuyers are gated behind punishingly high walls - this is not an "idle" game in any meaningful sense for the first few months, this is an active-play game with a lot of clicking and babysitting.

i'm done. it's just too slow, grinding is way too repetitive with not nearly enough automation, and i dread having to do three prestieges to get one upgrade that might make me 10% faster.

i really liked the overworld and solving simple puzzles to get new levels and level variants. unfortunately i viewed the levels themselves as a kind of unfortunate barrier to doing more of the overworld stuff. which is more about me than the game!

the platforming was surprisingly generous with checkpoints and allowing skips. it looks gorgeous. the movesets were clever and useful and there were plenty of secrets. i, uh, just didn't care to invest myself in any of them. its generous but fairly demanding (but not unfair) and it just isn't my bag.

i loved wacking a ball into bouncers and the BONG sound, i thought the collection of electricity as a currency and door unlock was super neat, the setting was fun and well-crafted, and the art!!! gorgeous.

i was also waiting for it to get juuust too hard for me, and it did. i was genuinely enjoying the frantic energy of the boss fights until they tilted a bit too far into the wrong direction.

it's gotta be hard making games. you come up with all this original and inventive stuff, it gets barely any attention, and then you get jerks like me who actually pick it up and appreciate it until it gets tough and then we put it down and complain.

im not done with it yet - im probably not even 1/4th of the way in, despite like a few weeks of active play and several hundred hours of idle play - because this game really is slow as uhhhhhhh hell, i guess. and it's weird because for an idle game that isn't neccessarily bad, but it's bad here because progress requires such an active playstyle and YET all the QOL stuff like autoclickers and autobuyers are gated behind dozens of prestiges... per layer.... and ok, i guess, for a game like this a guide is mildly encourage, but there isn't one. I mean, sure, there's a discord but it's fairly passive aggressive and the guide isn't super well written and people will just contradict it all the time and send you in different directions, but even FOLLOWING it i'm still fucking stuck.
i don't know. i like the unit descriptions and the art, and to an extent, the feel of the units building off of each other. i just hate! the pacing. i'm sticking with it but we'll see how long that lasts.

Replayed with the kids. The later levels and the treasure road portals make great use of every power. The hidden waddle dees push you to explore, sure, but also demand perfection for a few bosses. And the forgotten islands prove the developers knew exactly what they were doing - a few enemies get additional move sets that expertly increase the pressure. If anything, I wanted a dodge move to help me out some more.
I kept Easy on the entire play through and barely scraped by the back part of the game. Yet it’s always changing enemy and levels up enough that it never feels repetitive. If anything, I was left wanting just a taste more.
Overall, a great Kirby game and a great video game.