Four Divine Abidings
Posted June 12, 2025. Updated June 13, 2025. Played 3233 times for a total of 3296 hours.
description
Complete the Path in this mindfulness-themed idle/incremental hand-painted journey inspired by Buddhist philosophy.
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Update 02.07.2025
⬖ Minor bug fixes and polishing.
oh. my. god. i have been on 1x gamespeed this entire time...
developer response: it's a new addition by players request :)
btw if you keep 1x, you'll be able to import to Steam after 10th of July and get some unique achievements specifically designed for 1x.
Update 30.06.2025
⬖ Reduced the Wheel of Life milestone rebirths requirements, especially at late stages.
⬖ Reduced Seclusion retreat requirements.
These two Milestones were unnecessary grindy and unable to be achieved in a reasonably idle way.
⬖ All Insights of a Skill can now be refunded in a single click.
⬖ Game speed can be increased in settings up to 2x (down from 3x). This change only applies to new games.
⬖ Small bug fixes and UI improvements.
Okay I did have to laugh upon reaching T4 and realising there was in fact a way to mitigate Attachment right around the corner, albeit with a scary-sounding Milestone requirement that'll probably take a while to actually complete. Also laughed when my resources were barely enough to scrape together a measly 0.14% liberation progress 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.
Having gotten a fair bit further (Rebirth 20, accumulated about 78k Karma, currently saving up Insight to afford going up to T4 for the first time to complete the corresponding task), I think I can give a more thorough review. Though I do see a rather tantalising "Maximum Ascension reached: 1" 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 Meditation/Texts 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 getting all 32 Insights 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 (respec X times when I have two builds I'm happy with) or very grindy (25000 Dharma Wheel activations, gain 20k(?) Insight).
- 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. 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.
- Offering Bowl feels really bad to level up past level 1 because of the irreversible attachment increase. It's a straight nerf if you have to rely on an active/Wheel build to manage the higher levels of a tier, and even if you can manage an idle build it's not a huge payoff for the Merit investment and you're then somewhat locked out of a passive Wheel build until rebirth. I get the appeal of a risk/reward tool but in practice I've never wanted it.
- 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 :)
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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/
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'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.
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 :)
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.