itch.io

I wouldn't consider Strive a money management game, simply because that is the weakest part of the game. For the beginning, maybe the first hour or two, money is critical and lacking; the player starts with a slave with no stats to make money from jobs and combat is by far the best way of getting money and stats. After you reach mid-game, maybe after 4 to 6 hours,  money becomes easier to get from both combat and jobs with it becoming entirely trivial after you catch or buy multiple slaves.

It probably does better as an RPG, but honestly the difficulty follows a similar difficulty curve as the money management. So that works as long as you aren't expecting a challenge outside of early game.

I'd say that you are not at all wrong with that description. I've heard it described as a jack of many trades but master of none in terms of game genre. It's a mashup of several genre,  so it can be better to describe the game in terms of it's core appeal rather than all the little additional game mechanics.

The simple matter is that the game is badly made(edit: Mav was just starting to learn to program when he made it) though it has a strange intrigue to it that make people want much more from it. It's by no means the worst game or unplayable, but it was poorly conceived at the start, evolved many times to suit user requests, and did not end on a overall strong point (many systems were never finished or fleshed out). Some of the disjoint quality of parts of the game comes from the evolution process, and some of it comes from me choosing limited sections of the game to polish up.