TLDR - A novel theme, for sure - who doesn’t love a good egg? It’s nice to be able to smash an unlock button and not have to worry about hitting caps or over-strategizing load-out. It’s entirely up to the user as to when and where to spend their earned value. That said, the game is highly repetitive and becomes less-fun fairly quickly. A highly-repetitive goal of reset, smash button to unlock low-percentage drops, repeat means the novelty wears off fairly quickly. The theme… has very little to do with the game jam theme of “pressure,” but with some more work on prestige and some creativity to move the game beyond “click button to advance” it could have a very nice balance of style and novel gameplay.
- Fun - 4 / 10
- Novelty - 4 / 10
- Replayability - 2 / 10
- Gameplay Mechanics - 3 / 10
- Progression Balance - 6 / 10
- Style / UI - 5 / 10
- Creativity / Story - 3 / 10
- GJ Theme Adherence - 2 / 10
- QA (Bugs) - 9 / 10
Novely
The theme itself is bizarre and wonderful. It scratches the itch most folks who like to play incremental games look for and is exciting to play for the first few iterations. Unfortunately, that gets stale very quickly. The cliff-dive from novelty to tedium is pretty extreme in the game, as it turns out you simply need to reset and repeat over and over again to complete the game, where novel story, theme, or mechanics would provide a refreshing relief to those playing - possibly an opportunity for the developer post game-jam.
Theme / Story
The theme is fairly unique - somewhere between Eggs Inc. and wacky Merge games. That said - it has next-to-nothing to do with the Game Jam theme of “pressure.” There also is minimum story or any unfolding theme to the game. The style is constant from the first click to the last, which leaves something to be desired. There is good novelty in the initial theme, which is a saving grace, I just wish it expanded beyond that into more as the game progressed.
Gameplay Mechanics
Eggs are the MacGuffin that you unlock and make your numbers go up. You smash unlocks hoping to get more rare MacGuffins - we’ve played these games time and time again. It was fun for about the first 10 minutes, but left me wanting significantly more. I was really hoping for prestige with new mechanics, but was disappointed to find that the plan is to “reset and do it again.” Maybe an opportunity for further development, but it’s hard to see where the game would go from here.
Style / UI
A well-made UI that seems to work well on both Mobile and Desktop - very few, if any, bugs were encountered. The style is fairly clean, if maybe not super modern, but it fits with the theme. Some of the game would benefit from being able to understand status and progression in various tabs, and escaping from the concept of “click tab, click button” would be a good challenge to the dev to bring something refreshing to the genre we haven’t seen before.
That said, the artwork is unique and clever for unlocks - although it seems many of the references are extremely niche (if not completely random). An opportunity to build story through art might help build more engagement.
Fun (Summary)
The game was certainly fun enough to finish, as it was relatively quick to do so. The balance was fairly well managed, even if only through repetitive tasks. I would not recommend this as a first incremental - I think it would give folks the wrong impression that incremental games are tedium and buttons - but I wouldn’t tell people to avoid it either. If you’re looking for a quick, mindless play, this might be a good game for you.