comments for Four Divine Abidings
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I'd like to compliment the dev on the thought-through interface. I like the games that give players all the relevant info, and this one has plenty of info that is well presented and easily accessed.
developer response: Thank you for the kind words :)
I don't usually like to speak up with my opinion about a game before I give it at least a few hours first, but this one got me really hard. Maybe it's just because I feel kind of emotionally strip-mined as-is, but the images are gorgeous, and the vibe is immaculate. Thanks for making this.
developer response: Thank you for the feedback :)
I'm enjoying this so far. Quite a slow pace but I think that's very much intentional. Goes without saying that the art is gorgeous.
Some minor quibbles/feedback:
- it's possible to earn Insight, and buy the "Insight Reward Chance" skill, before being able to access the explanation of what Insight does. I spent a while trying to find it assuming I'd accidentally skipped it.
- In the Qualities page, Mental Energy is listed first, but in the Encounter Information, Physical Energy / Tick is listed first.
- I don't really understand the reason for preventing another full respec until you complete a few encounters, since you can just manually reset each individual skill and insight to achieve the same result at any time. Yeah, there's the Realignment milestone that could be cheesed, but there are plenty of tasks that can be cheesed the same way.
- I haven't unlocked the first level of Mala Beads yet, so it shows it locked behind Tier 2. Why not show this in the same way as the other tools locked behind Rebirths?
- Click Boost Length feels very weak if not pointless, since it's only relevant for active builds but playing actively means you can just boost after each effort tick anyway.
developer response: Thank you for the feedback and art compliment :)
- it's possible to earn Insight, and buy the "Insight Reward Chance" skill, before being able to access the explanation of what Insight does. I spent a while trying to find it assuming I'd accidentally skipped it.
I'm not sure what to do about it. For a very idle playstyle, game sequence might shift a little bit, but nothing game breaking. Do you consider it a big or a small inconvenience?
- In the Qualities page, Mental Energy is listed first, but in the Encounter Information, Physical Energy / Tick is listed first.
Good catch! I will fix this one.
- I don't really understand the reason for preventing another full respec until you complete a few encounters, since you can just manually reset each individual skill and insight to achieve the same result at any time. Yeah, there's the Realignment milestone that could be cheesed, but there are plenty of tasks that can be cheesed the same way.
It's just little steps to get into game systems. I left some small things being more effective than others at different stages of the game. So attentive players get some rewards faster :)
- I haven't unlocked the first level of Mala Beads yet, so it shows it locked behind Tier 2. Why not show this in the same way as the other tools locked behind Rebirths?
When unlocking Tools by Rebirths, you unlock them forever, as Rebirths don't go backwards. On the other hand, Tier locks will be effective each new Rebirth. Given Mala Beads example, it still can only be accessed on Tier 2 after the Rebirth. This way I tried to create balanced experienced, enjoyable through many Rebirths.
- Click Boost Length feels very weak if not pointless, since it's only relevant for active builds but playing actively means you can just boost after each effort tick anyway.
Give it some time, please :) There are different, evolving, intertwined game loops, not all of them are obvious at the early stage of the game.
One of game's design goals was to leave no useless Skills, Insights, Tools and other mechanics. I'm very curious to hear from you again :) I'm still polishing the game before Steam and mobile releases.
Update 19.06.2025
⬖ Game Speed setting in the main menu: can be increased up to 3x.
⬖ Minor UI improvements.
Update 16.06.2025
⬖ Claiming Milestones now requires additional click to confirm, so rewards can be previewed for more informed decisions.
⬖ Minor early Path balancing.
⬖ Minor UI/UX improvements.
Having gotten a fair bit further (), I think I can give a more thorough review. Though I do see a rather tantalising in the statistics so I suspect there's still a fair bit more game to see!
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Positives:
- I mentioned this before but the art really is amazing, especially for a genre all-too-often afflicted by "programmer art".
- Tools are fun. They're relatively well balanced, they all get their fair share of use (I lean into a lot but that's just a playstyle preference). I kinda wish there was some way to mitigate Attachment (Karma ability?) to allow for a Tool-heavy build.
- I really like the Tier 3 acclimation mechanic. Sometimes you're actively building it up, sometimes you're trying to avoid it. It's been interesting seeing the difference between my first T3 run (struggling to beat T3L1 to reduce my L0 acclimation and getting stuck with awful rewards) and later runs (relatively easily swapping between levels to maintain a good balance).
- The UI is effective at showing relevant information without being too overwhelming (another thing idle games are infamous for). The gritty details are readily available if desired but don't get in the way the rest of the time. Good stuff.
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Mixed:
- I really enjoyed some of the tasks; my favourite was probably as it really changed up my approach to the Rebirth. I think they're used well to encourage exploration of game mechanics the player might not have used before. That said, some tasks were either annoying () or very grindy (, ).
- I might be missing something, but does Calm Mode prevent the player from ever claiming Mindful Moments? I think it's a nice feature otherwise but this feels like an oversight.
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Negatives:
- Gameplay does get a bit repetitive after a while, though I realise this again kind of comes with the territory of idle games. The first few hours of each rebirth are now essentially identical with a hard cap on how quickly you can complete encounters for the early tiers. but I wish there was a way to speed it up with active play or reduce the number of required encounters. There are essentially three builds - - and the difference is only apparent once you grind back up to near where you last rebirthed.
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- It's really annoying how it matters what order in which you buy Insights with different costs. With my current Karma build, if I buy the Insights for Right Mindfulness from bottom to top it costs a total of 1,937 Insight, while buying from top to bottom costs a total of 145,419 Insight for the same outcome. All this really does is force more clicks to get what I want as I gain more skill points and Insight. Insight in general is a constant timewall so it's not something that you can afford to waste.
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Overall still one of my favourite games on this site and an easy 5/5 rating from me.
developer response: Thank you for such a thoughtful review. It was very exciting to read. I'm glad you are having fun with the game :)
Some balancing moments you mentioned will resolve on it's own as you progress further. In general, it was a design choice to keep things in a constant flux of effectiveness, rising and fading with players' progress.
"I might be missing something, but does Calm Mode prevent the player from ever claiming Mindful Moments? I think it's a nice feature otherwise but this feels like an oversight."
The idea of this feature was the calm observation of the game flow without manual interaction or visual disturbance. Some sort of meditation experience :) If you'd like a middle ground, I'd suggest trying turning off animation.
"- Gameplay does get a bit repetitive after a while, though I realise this again kind of comes with the territory of idle games. The first few hours of each rebirth are now essentially identical with a hard cap on how quickly you can complete encounters for the early tiers. Flow at least lets you leave it going overnight to get back to the later tiers but I wish there was a way to speed it up with active play or reduce the number of required encounters. There are essentially three builds - manual active, Dharma Wheel hybrid and non-Wheel idle - and the difference is only apparent once you grind back up to near where you last rebirthed."
Fair points. In my playthrough I looked into optimizing setups you mentioned for particular situations and mechanics. It mostly becomes relevant in the late game. The design idea was to shift the active part of the gameplay from clicking to build management. At T4 and Liberation chapter this optimizations can become really effective compared to completely idle builds. And if you do clicking progress at the same time, combined with Dharma Wheel, things speed up even more. Btw, did you notice that you can hold LMB instead if clicking? It becomes relevant with lower timeouts for active builds.
"- It's really annoying how it matters what order in which you buy Insights with different costs."
I'll look into it. I recently implemented smart refunds for Insights - so the order doesn't matter anymore for refunds. But for the "smart buying" costs information becomes not obvious. Now it's clear that costs always 10x, but for "smart buying" Insight costs look changing chaotically.
Do you think that adding additional button for all Insights respecc at once, for a given Skill, will make things better?
"Overall still one of my favourite games on this site and an easy 5/5 rating from me."
It's really joyful to read this :)
Started automatically doing "encounters" before I could even see the screen. I have no idea what is happening.
developer response: This automatic doing is a core loop, this is a fairly idle game. According to previous feedback, the game takes some time to get into, it uses some experimental gameplay and terms. Kindly let me know any further feedback or if you stopped playing altogether, I'm still tuning things.
Thank you for the comment.
If you put a wall in front of me and I can't progress, I'll figure out to hit the jump button. Having assimilated that, if you put a taller wall in front of me, I'll figure out that I can double jump. That is satisfying. A whole appendix for every element you click giving you a thousand new pieces of information at once is not.
developer response: Thank you for the feedback. Do you think "enable pop-up tutorials" setting will improve the experience?
Update 19072025
⬖ Tier 1 Level 3 where many players experienced a progress wall is now 60% easier. This will apply to new Encounters.
⬖ Fixed game import/restore during offline time calculations.
Update 25072025
⬖ Minor UI improvements.
⬖ Hot keys: E ncounter, H ome, P ath, S kills, T ools, M ilestones, Skill sets: 1, 2.
Accessible from Gems of Advice near the Main Menu:
Full, free Steam release: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3655580/Four_Divine_Abidings/
Highlights
⬖ 33 Steam achievements.
⬖ Cloud save support.
⬖ Linux support. Steam Deck support awaiting confirmations by players.
⬖ Save games import support from/to web version.
Okay I did have to laugh upon reaching T4 and realising . Also laughed when my resources were barely enough to scrape together a measly before rebirthing :) looking forward to seeing how things develop from here, already looking like the numbers will start ramping up.
For your questions:
- I hadn't actually noticed the ability to hold down LMB, I guess mostly because my active playstyle involves playing whack-a-mole :) but a nice tip for active Dharma Wheel builds.
- For Insights, the ability to respec all insights for a skill would be nice (not sure where the button would go though, logically it'd be in the "Skill level required | points cost" header above the other refund buttons but there isn't really room), but I think the root issue does need addressing. It should be possible to calculate the optimal cost for a given insight set (ordering from most to least expensive and multiplying each by the appropriate power of ten) and then display the difference as the cost for purchasing a new insight. I think this would've also given you the refund logic for free? I recognise your point that the costs change a little less elegantly (in my game at the moment buying "Gratitude in now" then "Honor the body" costs 176 + 288 = 464 Insight; buying them the other way around in the current system costs 29 then has the price go from 176 to 1760 for a total of 1789, while my proposal would have the price go from 176 to 435 to retain the lower 464 total), but this feels like a lesser evil to me.
Responding to dev response (new comment as Galaxy doesn't have threads):
For Insight, it's not a major issue at all, just a source of confusion that I ran into when deciding on early skill builds. It wasn't much longer after that when I unlocked Insights and learned what they were for anyway along with Merit and Karma. Perhaps a brief note could be added to the gameplay information for Right Livelihood, or the Insight, Merit and Karma scores in Home and Qualities could be revealed upon unlocking Skills, but certainly not worth affecting game balance over. Bear in mind this is a small nitpick that only came up because everything else was well polished!
Everything else makes sense. I figured Click Boost Length would come in handy much later down the line when effort recovery is (presumably) extremely high, but as you say, I'm still quite early in the game. For all I know there's an upgrade just around the corner that raises my divine abidings to the power of my click boost length and it becomes absurdly OP :) I'm at Wisdom 33 now so approaching the introduction of the Rebirth mechanic. I slowed myself down a fair bit by slogging through a T1L3 encounter a little too early, which got me thinking about sunk cost fallacy and the whole "letting go" concept. In a way I'm glad I made that mistake, because it linked back to the theming of the game rather nicely. Certainly more food for thought with this game than with TPT mod number 194.
developer response: Thank you for clarifying.
"... which got me thinking about sunk cost fallacy and the whole "letting go" concept. In a way I'm glad I made that mistake, because it linked back to the theming of the game rather nicely."
Reading this feedback brings joy :)
This game is peak, but i found a bug: When i undo an insight upgrade, like the click boost length upgrade in a certain way, i just get almost a full refund on the insight it took. I had the first 2 click boost length upgrades unlocked, and then i respecced the first upgrade, and i got a full refund for the second one so i only had to pay for the first one's increased price.
developer response: Thank you.
The game always refunds Insight points in the optimal way. This is best explained on an example:
1. Let's say all Insights of a Skill cost 1 point each.
2. You got 2 of them, you spent 1 point for the first and 10 points for the second (as price 10x'ed). Total you spent 11 points.
3. Now, if you refund the second Insight you directly get 10 points.
4. But if you refund the first Insight, you'd get only 1 point in a direct way. Instead the game optimizes this for you and refunds 10 points: the same as you refunded both and only purchased the second Insight for 1 point.
Shortly speaking, the game optimizes refunds in favor of the player.
Hmm, I don't think this game is for me. There's no direct "numbers going up" which is what I usually play idle games for.
So far this strikes me as some kind of "meditation aid" based on the feel.
Not sure if I should give the game a score or not. It's clearly not for me, but given the lack of interest on my end I can't really say whether it's good or not.
developer response: Thank you for the comment. Indeed, this is not classical number go up game, though you get to higher numbers in the end game, they are still in the range of millions.
bro i waited like 30 mins its not loading
developer response: it was the game update, should be fixed by now.
Update 20.06.2025
⬖ Pop-up tutorials can now be disabled after reaching Wisdom Level 2.
⬖ Minor UI improvement.
⬖ Right click and ESC can now be used to switch Encounter and Home views, close Tools, Skills, Path, Milestones and Karma Seeds panels.
⬖ Encounter requirement for full respec is reduced to 1.
Update 22.06.2025
⬖ Minor balancing.
⬖ Minor UI/UX improvements.
I see people understandably downvoting, because they think the game has AI art. But it is not the case, the art is hand-painted by a professional artist; soon will be getting its own offline exhibition.
Here is a link to hand-painted album: https://www.reddit.com/r/4da/comments/1jqvahx/hand_painted_album/