Outliers: Incrementum

oh okay i just looked at the health of the first enemies and the damage the knives do, you literally programmed them to be unable to kill enemies, wtf

oh yeah and a third thing, a helpful qol type thing you could add is making the cursor hitbox a bit larger while hovering over your brother, sometimes monsters get him even though i swear ive got the cursor on him

teleportation via the pause menu is quite fun, but i somehow feel like its maybe unintended, idea: make that an intentional thing, maybe with a cooldown and charges

wow these knives are horrible, they do practically no damage, and they stop my extra damage for undamaged enemies ability

Can't downgrade the Prestige 2 dungeon so now I can't fully finish out the whole skill tree

Also either make the Arrows way more noticeable or make Knives destroy them cause good Lord man with a shield can't even block it

This game is an interesting concept, but there is a lack of a tutorial and it is really confusing at the beginning. The items also don't collect half the time and it is really laggy.

This is really fun but can feel grindy/slow at times. The story is cute too.

WHAT I NEED TO DO?! :D

This game is an A rank.
Just remember that thats its potential, its not that good yet.

Alright, I just finished up the demo and I've got a number of pacing problems:

The tutorial is superfluous and takes as many clicks to get started as some older incrementals.

The balance is very much a "You either can or you can't" system, be it damage or stamina loss on hit. You reach a floor and it's either doable by spinning the mouse around quickly, or you're just dead. The boss especially has this problem where I had to max out my damage, my crit chance, stamina loss on hit, and flow state triggering all the way down to 0%. Which is a bit of a grind with the way resources work...

Resources are split up in a way that mostly just burns time for no good reason. A majority of my time by the end was spent grinding for blue shards because all of the remaining upgrades required them. Of note, I maxed out rare creature chance and extra drop chance immediately and still had to wait the longest on this resource to get to the end of the game. I just wasn't getting enough blue for all the blue upgrades the final boss required, making me grind all the way to the boss something like 10 times with every floor being virtually free otherwise. Just a painful timesink.

Daggers just kind of do nothing, and are even a hinderance since flow state requires enemies to be full health to trigger, and daggers fly around just about everywhere doing barely any damage, just enough to deny your biggest damage multiplier from building up sometimes at random. It's also a beginner trap, because you really want the flow state percentage upgrade and maxing it out takes 5 level ups, but you can't get to that without using a key, of which there are only 2, and you NEED to use the first one on the daggers in order to reach the core damage upgrades behind it. So there's a huge stretch of game where the resource from leveling is basically just useless, but since each level takes more experience, by the time I found the flow state percentage upgrade it took a lot longer to grind for more.

All in all, it felt like my upgrades meant little to nothing for most runs, just being a grinding battle to be allowed to participate on the next floor, but since you have to wade through all the previous floors the end result it just progress taking forever for no good reason. I was also very disappointed when I first unlocked XP gain not knowing what it would do, I assumed it would raise my stats over the course of runs parallel to the upgrade tree, but no, it gave me a new resource I didn't have a use for until just about the end of the game.

Also, small note: The archers are unreasonably difficult compared to the melee enemies. I did just fine by spamming my mouse around even harder and reacting quickly, but realistically they should probably sit there for half a second or so before firing instead of appearing out of nowhere and giving you an instant problem with half a second to see and block.

Of all the nodebuster clones, this sure is one, specifically the type that annihiliates my wrist with all the nonstop circular to back and forth mouse movements. Competent project, but not a very satisfying game as it exists right now.