Journey to Ascension

Surprisingly good balancing and engaging at every moment, with you always left questioning "Is there anything I can do to optimize my runs further?". Amazing game and amazing retake of Prismatic Adventure.

I'm on playthrough 3. Amazing game. You really thought through player QoL well and kept the content fun and engaging, while always feeling there is meaningful progress. One fun feature would be a "new game+" concept similar to what Increlution does where you get small boosts that persist between full playthroughs. That or just a lot more content... or a sequel. Please.

fun through until the end. There are definitely some slower moments, but then when it picks up again it just feels better. Really picks up in speed near the end! 4.5/5 !

you can get negative amount of rings by repeatedly clicking cast ring into fire

Well-designed, well-balanced. Was fun from the first moment until the last. Excellent game!

Is there any chance an option can be made to just automatically do a reset?

I beat this elsewhere. Fun, a bit grindy, but fun, and one of the better take on the "Skill up, reset life" game types. One thing that would have (to me) elevated it, would have been one-liner story elements on each activity, giving context for what's going on, and then a final one-or-two paragraph victory screen. Otherwise it's a fun play through!

@Polos: You're probably thinking of Prismatic Adventure, by Kuzzi. The dev of this one was explicitly inspired by that game, though there are a number of differences.

@ignDevi: One of those differences is that there is WAY less micromanagement of consumables in this game. If you're 100 loops in and still needing to micromanage items, I'd go out on a limb and say you're doing something very wrong. I've completed the game on itch.io, and only at very, very rare points when I was trying to push further than I probably should have did I ever have to do anything more complicated that "one run use no consumables, one run auto-use consumables". Bosses are usually something that you come back to when you're a little stronger, though girlvomit's point about many of them being a one-and-done to grab a perk is also a fair point. You also missed that one of the rewards for killing a boss is "power", which makes your combat speed faster across runs.

I'm wondering if one of the problems you're having is related to this statement: "having to completely disable item automation to save them for the right moment is stupidly annoying". That... shouldn't be the case. You mentioned Scroll of Haste, which is an artifact and isn't consumed by item automation. There are a total of four artifacts through the game, and those you hold until they're pertinent. As for "save them for the right moment"? The bonuses from consumables last the entire run that you use them. You should generally either be consuming everything as soon as you get it, or consuming nothing the entire run if you're collecting consumables for a push. If you are holding onto a consumable with a bonus until you "need" it, then you have wasted a bunch of energy prior to that point.

you don't have to beat the bosses every time, or at least not early on, the actual reward for doing them is the extra action that gets permanently well until you prestige at least unlocked which either grants a bonus perk or a new item type

for example for the goblin warlord just defeating him once & then doing "save the village" once to grab the perk is all you really need to do, you can ignore both of those actions afterwards in every run until you become strong enough that fighting the goblin only takes like 1-2 energy and you can afford to include that bossfight in each of your runs to farm a little bit of extra power

i also don't bother micromanaging item use either, i've been coasting along just fine by doing 1-2 loops with auto-item off, then turning it on for the next run & using everything all at once

We should be able to keep boss automation on between prestige runs.