Loopbound

Not a bad start to an incremental in the vein of Terraformental and Increlution. It's very light on content compared to those games, with only 30 or so hours of progress... most of which is grinding rather than discovering new things since the Early Access balance feels a little off. The ratio of time spent each loop between repeating old content and exploring new doesn't seem quite there, and there's limited opportunity so far to optimise you solution beyond the initial one you come up with. So grinding out the necessary 5 (usually) repetitions to automate a step feels like more of a punishment than it does in other games where the progress is more granular and even the second or third repetition feels significantly faster than the first. Here the first, second, third repetitions all feel very similar and the fourth starts to feel a bit better, then the fifth lets you automate it and largely stop caring about it, other than how long you go afk waiting for the loop to catch up to the point where it needs manual input. It's hard to describe, it just doesn't quite feel right. The point where speed up happens is the point where you basically stop needing to care about it. And the vast majority of real-time speedup happens only when you complete a zone. Again, this is after the point where you really care about feeling it. If you have to leave the computer running for 8 minutes for it to get to the start of the content that you need to interact with, then a difference between that 8 minutes and 6 minutes isn't going to be noticed by you. It's probably just going to finish after 6 minutes and then sit there waiting 2 minutes for you to notice anyway. A bunch of QoL stuff was added in the month after Early Access release, but there's still some important ones like prioritizing emergency consumption of food to items that are replenishable in the current area that would make a huge difference in letting you use your food strategically. And/or setting priorities on their consumption. Watching it eat my Stale Bread pile when there's two other food items that can be gathered in the current area and I know that in two minutes I'm going to need as much food buffer as I can get is... frustrating. It's also extremely CPU intensive for a game that basically just displays 3-4 progress bars updating at a time. I suspect it's spinlocking somewhere, because even when no action is progressing and the game is effectively paused, it maxes out one core, yet it drops to zero CPU if I manually pause the game. Overall, I cautiously recommend that game, with the proviso that it's very very early into its Early Access journey, and there's other far better incrementals in the same style with far more content for a similar or better price point, and the genre is stuffed with the abandoned shells of games from people who found out that writing compelling content for incrementals is hard. This game is right in that death zone of mostly-solid mechanics and now just a long long long slog of creating, testing, balancing content and having good story ideas. I wish it luck.

Really like this take on an increlution-type game (personally prefer it over the original). The non-linear paths and permanent unlocks are great. I like the reset currency use for setting up automations. Each world having its own stats was surprising at first, but then it turns out that stats in one world boosts the XP for the stats in other worlds. It also means more things to farm. Each route is quite different from each other including things like a maze where you gradually fill in a map each run, swamp with poison, desert with desiccation, and a fun story that gradually develops each loop. Definitely recommend this game for players that like rebirth games with gradual metaprogression into an OP character with an exploration rpg component.

Boring plot, no real visuals, and unexciting gameplay that boils down to pressing the same buttons on repeat until you've done it enough times that the game lets you progress. Even the supposed "difficult area" only has a basic traversal restriction, which matters very little since you'll just spam training then make a loop. The incentives to do past areas again are abysmally low, so much so that until you have several unlocked for greater time skip speed it is never better to do them. From the forum post on AI usage the dev seems to think that they've got a good enough grasp on interesting mechanics to forego the story and visuals to a large extent, but they really don't. It doesn't matter how complicated the different resources are to keep track of in your head when any player can easily beat almost any section through sheer brute force. Terrible.