itch.io

Oh! They definitely should have added that to the listed controls. I'll have to play it later and revise my review.

I like the idea of the game, and it looks like it could be quite enjoyable but...

The expanding tiles doesn't work. Not in a 'Oh it isn't fun' sort of way, but in a functional sort of way. It would be fine is there was a way to move the play area around or even zoom out, but by time I got to 'Thinking' with the sticks and stones, I essentially got softlocked due to physically not having enough space on the board for more tiles. That being said, my review might be a bit off due to not being able to experience the full game, but...

Balance: Up until I got softlocked I was able to enjoy exploring and seeing what the game had to offer. I have seen some people mentioning difficulty getting resources later on, but I didn't see that while playing.

Uniqueness: While not entirely original, there aren't many games with these sorts of mechanics, the top ones I can think of being Cultist Simulator and Stacklands. I think these mechanics can work really wonderfully for exploration with limited visuals and wish they were explored more, so kudos for that!

Fun: I had been having fun until I got softlocked, but I got softlocked pretty early on and it sort of sucked all of that fun away. Due to being able to click things to see recipes, I know there was a lot more to do. It left me feeling cheated.

Theme: Just like with balance, I couldn't really tell how the theme would progress after I got softlocked, and because of that it felt more like a survival incremental where you collect resources to build a community similar to stackland then a game about alchemy. The only alchemy thing I saw was the cauldron. 

I finally figured it out. I would like to say maybe make a small tutorial. I really wanted to like this game, as I did finally find screenshots of a few things in it, and kept seeing it work. Finally realized you could take apart the clock to then replace the old parts. Aside from that one hiccup it looks quite nice. I actually could see this being a full fledged game. Just, maybe make a tutorial showing how to take apart the clock to activate upgrades? Cheers though, a very nice game.

This is just bad. It looks like it could be fun if it, well, did anything. You put the crank in, you crank it up, you get currency, and buy gears and parts, and then you just repeat, with the gears and parts literally doing what looks to be nothing. At first I thought maybe you used the gears and parts to modify the clock itself, maybe adding parts to the clock to make it wind faster or do more things, but the gears and parts are completely uninteractable. Then I thought maybe Its me, maybe I just don't know how to pick them up but even the auto-builder doesn't do anything but put the crank in. Then I'm thinking maybe I just haven't bought the first gear yet, but I ended up playing this long enough to get all the parts. Nothing. Disappointing.

I quite enjoyed it, until I found a strange bug. If setting stuff to auto-buy, your Letsy profits will suddenly drop down to about 1000 dollars a day. Practically grinds your progress to null. Sad, because it was very fun until then.