comments for Ethereal Ascension

The whole game just screams "completely AI generated".
- Too much theme, too much filter and sugarcoating. Even the names of the buttons, realms, dungeons and everything with all the pointlessly detailed forced mystical theme is just something an AI would come up with.
- Not to mention it has a terrible pacing. Everything just feels unearned from the very start, the permanent/ascension bonuses and artifacts are pretty much the same as any other upgrades, they just won't reset.
- Even the description has such a completely inhuman, pristine "advertisement" vibe it almost falls off the screen.
This is a 2/5 at best sorry. Not unplayable, but... well... just nothing.

This game really likes using incredibly flowery text that has a real problem of never quite getting to the point (seriously, look at that description, my eyes glaze over as each bog-standard feature is hyped up in excruciating detail). But like, the actual systems are...

They're Cookie Clicker. You've played this before. Sure, buildings are "realms", and upgrades are "artifacts", and prestige is "power", but... it's still Cookie Clicker.

I guess there's a dungeon exploring feature early on? Once you get past the initial shock of having an incomprehensible UI presented to you all at once, you quickly realize it's pretty much just another active way of gaining cookies- i mean "essence", and all of the "combat" and "stats" are about as deep as a puddle (it boils down to "click attack and eventually you will win any fights")

i suspect significant portions of this were outright AI generated. it's not quite a 1/5 because like, the UI generally isn't bad and it could maybe be something unique with enough time and effort, but like. yeah i've played this before. dozens of times.

nice game description. where'd you get it from? the game description store?

What in the AI is this game description

This feels vibe coded. The UI looks like something Websim would make, and the gameplay feels like the only kind of incremental Websim can make: Cookie clicker.

Yeah the games okay... pretty boring and the games interface is pretty hard to navigate on mobile.
Nice description who wrote it? ChatGPT?

Now and forever against AI slop.

It's really not that bad. I mean, sure, it's not very innovative, but neither are dozens of the TMT mods and basic clicker games here. The LLM description is pretty sad, but as far as the theming goes, it's probably not bad to have leaned into it that far because it's all it has lol. The dungeon idea is neat, and I think the dev should consider leaning into both that and adding some sort of world building / context if they're so into the fantasy theme. One of the reasons it feels so flowery is because there no rhyme or reason or consistency in the fantasy theme. It's all so bland and holds no value, as things stand. It kind of feels like it's going for the "ruler of all universes and ultra-powerful void/reality god", like with perhaps Progress Knight, but with absolutely zero of the weight / impact / story / consistency that game had to make you feel like you'd earned it.

Aside from perhaps refining the language/world; finding all artifacts in the dungeon before you're able to "unlock [their] full potential/activate them" by buying them, as well as more interactivity with the combat / stats, may go some way towards making the game more unique. A more complex / gameplay-focused dungeon. The pacing is also a little odd, so the balance could use some work, but that's a common and difficult to solve problem that often ties into personal preference. Additionally, only a minor detail, but it does seem a little strange to have the achievements feats visible at all times (though collapsible, which is nice) when they don't really add anything or have any impact on gameplay. It's nice to have as a guide of sorts in some games, but it doesn't really serve the same function here as it's so simple. I like them as a nice dopamine-inducing popup from time to time as a signal of progress, however meaningful due to balance, but I think it would be more useful to have other information or a "Channel Essence" button there instead, etc, and move the feats to somewhere like a new grimoire tab of sorts, collapsed on the bottom left, etc.

I also (AI aside) think it's pretty rude to call a dev lazy for not making their own icons. It would be really nice and go a long way if it did have some custom art, but some people just don't have the artistic skill or the interest to spend hundreds or thousands of hours learning, and it would be unreasonable to expect them to pay an artist for the free clicker game they're releasing as a hobby. They could buy icon packs from itch.io or something, but unless the pack happened to have exactly what they need, they may need to buy several-- and the clashing art styles could be off-putting. The emojis, while certainly not ideal, are a pretty OK compromise all things considered. It's not like they filled the game with soulless, low-effort AI art (though, as I type this, I did just see that the "stone golem" in the dungeon has the standard man face emoji, which is honestly ridiculous lol. Emojis imo are fine enough next to text, resources, etc, but... if you don't have something even vaguely sensible, as for the monsters, I think it would be better served having no image for them at all). It's also OK to just not have an image next to every little thing, but that's more personal preference I suppose (Text-based games <3).

I honestly kind of like the UI / color scheme; which I feel fits the vibe of the game. I appreciate the easy access to the information in the active bonuses and chronicles containers on the left, and being able to collapse them is nice too. I like the base concept of the theme and the core concept of the dungeon / finding artifacts in the dungeon a lot.

Right now, it's pretty mid. There's very little that I consider fun or engaging that keeps me wanting to play. That being said, I don't actively dislike it, and I can definitely see some potential for sure if the dev feels the desire to continue working on it. I couldn't find a version number anywhere, so it's hard to tell what stage of development it's in.

Been on the site since it came out. This game singlehandedly made me make an account just to comment. I'm going to keep it short for the sake of brevity the game.js //notes alone are damning I don't think this game is just "LLM assisted" as the Author states. I'm throwing the accusation that all of it is. Although I don't personally play his other game "Immoral Attack", I'm confident that he has the ability to code better than this.

The permanent attack obtained in the dungeon decreases when I level up the attack, it's poorly programmed, write it down to fix it

so. I've sampled the game a little bit, so ill give my opinion on it because its clear its missing something.
the GUI:
this game knows what it is doing in this department, the GUI is nice to click through and is almost all the time responsive. the achievement popups and all this stuff are done well and its clear that the developer knows quite a bit of CSS. (i'm assuming this game wasn't mostly written by chatgpt)

the game itself (mechanics, the way it feels to play):
i click the game, and i see it. The same exact thing I've seen before dozens of times. a big button, a bunch of infinitely buyable generators, and an upgrades tab. i mean. It certainly works, it functions, but it doesn't excite me, it doesn't make me feel like this game has much to offer, or that the author of it put a lot of time into thinking what the game will be about. the dungeon feature looks confusing and i wish it was fleshed out more and became the main focus of the game, because then the game would be unique, it would be something new, at least to me.

the descriptions:
i mostly check the discord channel in the galaxy discord to see the new releases. i click on the channel, and i see a giant wall of text, as i read the first sentence ...
"Ethereal Ascension invites you into a mystical realm where the fundamental energies of existence flow through your fingertips, waiting to be harnessed and shaped by your will."
... my eyes immediately glaze over. its clear to me from the first sentence that the whole thing wasn't written by a human, but by a large language model.

And i thought... surely i can do the same, i can generate a pretty close replica of the description of the game. I fed gemini this prompt:

"please write a description for an incremental game called "ethereal ascension" where you progress through realms, fight through dungeons, use powerful artifacts, and channel essence to progress "
the response it gave me was not very long, so i asked it to be more verbose. below are the first 2 out of 6 paragraphs:

"Embark on a profound and captivating journey in Ethereal Ascension, an incremental game that invites you to transcend the limitations of the physical world and ascend through a multitude of breathtaking ethereal planes. You begin as a mere wisp of consciousness, a nascent spirit adrift in the cosmic currents. Your primary task is to gather Essence, the very lifeblood of these spectral realms, a potent energy that permeates all of existence. Diligently channel this fundamental force, allowing it to coalesce and empower your spiritual form, gradually unlocking shimmering gateways that lead to uncharted Realms.

Each new Realm you discover unfolds as a vibrant tapestry of otherworldly landscapes, teeming with unique flora, fauna, and enigmatic entities. Explore crystalline forests that hum with celestial energy, navigate swirling vortexes of pure thought, and traverse landscapes sculpted from solidified dreams. Within these diverse environments lie hidden pathways and profound secrets waiting to be unearthed by a discerning spirit." - Gemini

Doesn't this sound eerily similar? I don't even have to say anything else, its self-evident.

the worst part is that the whole game is like that. All the names for all the mechanics sound so detached from what they actually are. "Realms" = generators, "Artifacts" = upgrades ... so on, its fun to make abstractions like this in games but that requires world building, you have to explain why the things in your fictional world are called the things they are called.

from what ive seen in the code the author made their thing for big numbers, which i can commend, assuming it wasnt written by chatgpt / gemini or whatever else exists

anyway. im running short on characters. Heres what i think is missing from the game:

The human soul in general, i'm quite sure that at least 50% of the game was not made by human hands, but by a large language model of some sort.
I can see the passion, i just hope that the author starts putting in more work themselves and not make an LLM their co-developer.

I don't think I've been this aggressively uninterested in a game in at least half a year.
It really is just a basic clicker game with way WAY too theme-y language, without actually having anything noteworthy. Hell, even the hard reset button is victim of the theme-y language.
The dungeon is admittedly not a standard part of a basic clicker, but it's so minimal and basic it can be ignored.

bro why does the game poster look like ai

what does 0,50.00 mean??

Did You Come Up With That Description Yourself?

a perfect example that slick UI would get you only that far without an intriguing game play.
-5 points for using AI and not even a slightest effort of putting your human soul into the game

The fact that you couldn't even be bothered to make your own icons... How lazy of a dev are you? I don't even want to look at the code...

Pretty solid as is, but the game is... kind of overwhelming looking with all of the theming. I wish there were some more simple themes with less colors... Also, I feel the dungeon navigation is kind of annoying with the buttons shifting around, I think it could be improved to just put the buttons as some arrow buttons, like an up button that makes you move north, a down button that makes you go south, etc.

too much theming, but still neat

well...it was decent until i ascended the first time, and then i can just ascend infinitely