itch.io

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.

TLDR - The game tackles one of the most commonly under-represented elements of incremental games -  the UI - but at the sacrifice of derivative gameplay mechanics and lacking, extended playability. This leaves a pleasing looking game, but one that is not very fun to play. There is promise that additional focus on adding unique game mechanics could make this a classic.

• Fun - 3 / 10
• Novelty - 3 / 10
• Replayability - 1 / 10
• Gameplay Mechanics - 2 / 10
  
• Progression Balance - 7 / 10
• Style / UI - 5 / 10
• Creativity / Story - 3 / 10
• GJ Theme Adherence - 10 / 10
• QA (Bugs) - 7 / 10

And now some comments on a few of these scores…

Creativity / Story

The theme is fairly unique, focusing on building pressure for …rich person space reasons, but the rationale for why and the story of the game is fairly one-dimensional. Not entirely unexpected for a game jam, but there is tremendous opportunity to create an unfolding plot and motivation for the user in future development.

Gameplay Mechanics

The game introduces the MacGuffin of gas as the stand-in item of increment and does not stray from it.  It seems like most time spent during the jam was likely spent on the UI, which left the mechanics extremely derivative of so many other “pump and dump” incremental games, copying from cookie clicker, AdCap, etc, but with less playability. There is a reason why some of the most popular Incremental games on the market forego design for creative mechanics (A Dark Room, Candy Box, etc…).

The tie-in of temperature, and this pressure, to the mechanic of encouraging user interaction provides some alleviation to the copy-paste style of the mechanics; however, at the end of the day, the game mechanics are a carbon copy of nearly every other basic clicker game.

The game could easily be replicated in basic spreadsheet software in a matter of minutes, which should be a challenge to the developer to stress creativity and uniqueness in their game mechanics.

Style / UI

This is where development time was clearly mostly spent - with the visualization of pressure being both unique and pleasing. It does stop at the first door you come to, unfortunately, with no other visuals, UI, or design elements coming into play at any time, even when additional gameplay elements like Heat come into play, which is a major lost opportunity.

The interface itself is your standard button upgrade and click target - per the basic mechanics mentioned above. It does seem to work well on both PC and Mobile, although there are some bugs with upgrade buttons overlapping and becoming unpressable as well as level numbers disappearing - at least on mobile (iOS, Firefox).

Fun (Summary)

The game is fine - it’s a carbon copy clicker you’ve played dozens of times before from game jams. There is a saving grace with the concept of heat building pressure to increase user interaction, but that is the apex of any novelty brought to the genre with the submission. The developer clearly has talent in building web animations, and should continue to expand their skill set into theme building and put some major thought into creating unique game mechanics that revolve around them.

Great game - my only point I didn’t like it is when new game plus didn’t continue after the first! Would love to keep repeating the play and doubling the speed (in lieu of another prestige mechanic). Lots of fun!