Increlution Reviews

For the people complaining that the game is abandoned, There is a pinned dev diary in the discussions where the dev explains that updates have been delayed due to longer than expected health issues. For the game itself, I find it more of a incremental game than an idle game per se, especially for the first 5-10~ hours. It works well as a second monitor kind of game, and the early game is rather high maintenance. However, once you get a little deeper in you get to leave it for a more and more extended period of time. The demo gives quite a good feel of the game mechanics, but they are quite different then regular idle games and take awhile to adjust to. Overall I think the name of the game is the most atp to describe it, it is an Incremental game of evolution through generations.

The grind is tedious, the story is boring and the game developers have put it out to pasture.

This game is simple, but enjoyable. Try the demo. It gives a really good idea of what the full game is like.

Amazing idle game where your decisions actually matter. The Discord is active and people are always willing to help if you get stuck. I went from whining about the pacing to understanding things better and feeling like it is a Masterpiece. I'm not done yet, will update if anything changes.

Fun game but abandoned due to developer health issues. At this point it's been longer without an update than it was being actively updated. That said, did I get a couple of quid's worth of enjoyment out of the content that's there? Yes. It's good value for money, but unfortunately in an unfinished state. On balance I'm giving it a thumbs up because even with that unfinished state it's still value for money, and enjoyable. But with the strong caveat that if you want the narrative to be finished and completing games is important to you, it may leave you annoyed. The game itself is an interesting visual-novelesque incremental based around automating your path through a choose-your-own-adventure style story, with each loop giving you bonuses to the completed steps. This approach exposes some interesting mechanics compared to many other idler/incremental games, some of which end up having important counter-intuitive ramifications as you get deeper into the game. This makes it a bit more thoughtful than some other incrementals, but can also lead to frustration when in the later stages multiple counter-intuitive mechanics end up trapping you in a situation where the fact that you're improving actually makes your progress harder. Once you figure these bumps in the road out and change your strategy it stops being an issue, but I suspect many people, after having been trained by multiple hours of gameplay that "getting better is getting better" are going to be a little miffed by the feeling of "getting better now appears actively harmful, and your goal is getting further away on each loop". Some of this could be mitigated by some tutorialisation or a smoother introduction of the new concepts, but unfortunately most of this is in the final couple of chapters of the game which were the last updates before things dried up, so it may never happen - and it's possible a number of users will give up in frustration and feel the game has been left in a broken state rather than merely an unfinished one. Hopefully I'll be proven wrong and once the developer returns to health they'll return to development, but reading of the old devblogs talking of 80+ hour weeks, I doubt (and honestly hope) that such an unsustainable pace belongs firmly in the past.

I was initially excited by the unfolding nature of the game. but the grind is absolutely unreal. Almost 20 hours of "gameplay" and I've experienced about 1 or two minutes of content. You have to restart constantly, redoing 30 minutes of tedium, and only the last minute of the 30 actually represent progress. Each new step represents multiple restarts to progress through, meaning hours of grind. Every replay is exactly the same, with no decisions to be made. Literally the worst grind I have ever experienced.

I like incremental games that think outside the box, and I prefer to play these games actively rather than passively, so this is how I picked up increlution some time ago. Increlution doesn't seem to know which of the two paths it wants to take. It's both idle and active play and neither is very satisfying. You restart runs ad infinitum and let it run for 20 minutes on automation that you have to unlock by reaching arbitrary "you did this action X times so now your character can do it automatically" just to play in the last 5 minutes before you die and have to restart and do it all over again but this time maybe you can do one more progress action. Your progress is blocked by arbitrary "you must explore X place", and you must explore the mcguffin 8 times to automate it starting from next run, but you can only explore it one time per run, so you MUST do 8 runs before you can explore X place. And then do it all over for Y place. The more you play, the less you play? It's that kind of game. It's literally click on this button every 20 minutes, and your runs are only getting longer, not shorter. I don't even mind that there hasn't been an update since july 2023 because there seems to be content, it's just tedious to get there. The gameplay loop needs work, but I don't know if we'll ever see it. Where are the branching paths? Where is the "is it better to improve this first, or that first"? Where is the prestige mechanic that gives you points you can spend to unlock automations, improve your skills durably, or start from later in the run?

This game falls into the pitfall of many idlers where the grind is the entire gameplay. I tried to enjoy it, I really did, but it quickly got to the point where progress was literally impossible without grinding out several more lives to shave off seconds. The brutal time limit created by the ramping health decay was an interesting idea, but it failed to add more enjoyment to the game in its current form. Unless you move fast enough (by painfully slogging through the entire game to get to NG+ or by bashing your head against the time wall for hours on end) you WILL get to a point where your skills are just *too low* to keep up with the exponentially faster demand of food, once again DEMANDING that you restart from the very beginning and *slog* your way through the very beginning *again*. I have too many other things that I would rather spend my time with, and I need to manage my REAL time carefully. Playing an idler where the main gameplay loop is waiting for a timer to go up out of nothing but *spite*? Not worth my time.

No updates since July 2023 Can't fully describe why or how, but the way the game is paced, you're bound to have the game open for hours at some points making extremely little progress. You can't idle it either, as automation is locked until you've used the skill manually for long enough.

The game is a prototype, not even an early access. And it has been like that for several years already. Don't play it, it is empty and unfun. There are better idle games out there.