I rate this 1 star merely due to the number of different complaints I have this game, while finding myself with nothing good to say about it, so I feel it's deserved.

It's too slow, firstly. It's fine at the VERY start, but before long, every single upgrade amounts to...wait a minute. Sit there and do nothing for, say, 67 seconds. The only thing you can do to speed that up is repeatedly click a button to raise your income by a small fraction, so you can instead click repeatedly for 40 seconds, if you want to. And you might think, that doesn't sound too bad...but surprise! The reward for waiting is...that you have to wait for another 70 seconds for the next upgrade. And you can't just upgrade production, because your buildings give SO little and get SO expensive so quickly, that you will be actively slowing yourself down significantly, meaning you're doubling your wait time in order to shorten the next one by 5%.

The cost ramping is obnoxious and, frankly, unnecessary. Seriously, I can't be the only one tired of the trope of buildings arbitrarily getting more expensive each time you build another one, right? Like...you couldn't come up with a more creative limit there? Just increased waiting times?

Besides that, an immediate gripe I have with the game is about the various story-related popups which appear, usually telling you what your next goal is.

These goals, as far as I could find, are not tracked anywhere. And I also could find no way to reread old popups. ...And the popups show up instantly, without warning, and if you click ANYWHERE on the screen, the popup goes away forever, meaning you never get to read the ONE flimsy source of direction the game gives you! (This happened to me multiple times, as I clicked to buy something the instant a story/tutorial popup appeared, instantly closing it before I could react.) If there is ANY way to later reference these goals or reread these popups, I could not find it.

Speaking of, the game has very poor communication to the player in general. When you buy up to 5 and 10 of certain buildings, it unlocks new permanent upgrades you can buy for those buildings...but it doesn't do this for all buildings, apparently. And the game doesn't tell you which buildings will unlock upgrades, nor at what count you'll get an upgrade, so you'll sometimes find yourself blindly grinding for the next milestone for a certain building, hoping for an ACTUAL upgrade to your production, since buying more buildings VERY quickly stops being very profitable, given the aggressive price scaling...and then no upgrade will appear, meaning you've essentially wasted that time for a tiny boost to your production. In essence, you would've made progress faster if the game actually TOLD you what upgrades will unlock next, at what thresholds and for what!

The game also does a poor job at giving the player direction in general, frankly. Some time into my brief playthrough, I found myself with the strong feeling that I wasn't DOING anything, that I was completely aimless, I felt like I was accomplishing nothing at all. The game wants me to get water, but water needs more oxygen, and I can't hold enough so I need to wait for over a minute to get enough oxygen...to buy the oxygen storage upgrade, resetting the waiting timer with a slightly longer wait to get the upgrade that lets me collect water, to...unlock more of the exact same loop, but slower?

I felt quite powerless to actually solve ANY of the problems I was facing as a player. Instead, it felt like I was just ticking off a checklist. Buy production buildings, wait, buy upgrade, wait, buy storage to buy next upgrade, wait more, buy more storage for next upgrade, continue waiting, buy next upgrade...and then by production building with different name, wait, buy storage, wait, buy production upgrade for new resource, wait, buy storage, wait, buy more production buildings, wait, buy more storage, buy more power production, buy more storage, by next upgrade, repeat, repeat, repeat!

It felt quite miserable. I had no options to fix the ACTUAL problems I had as a player, I was just expected to endure through more, for the honor of...even more garbage to wade through, but this time even deeper!

I felt quite purposeless. Compounded with my other issues, it was a quite unpleasant experience.

But wait! The game is Early Access, right? It's listed so right there, after all! So maybe the game will get better, let's see, the last update listed in the in-game changelog is...from 2023. Okay, what's their longest gap between updates been...yep, every update was from 2023.

In short, it's abandoned, folks. The odds are SLIM of the developer continuing work on this, and if they do, then the label could always damn well be updated to show the game's resumed development, couldn't it? But right now, all signs point to "Abandoned", so I'll request for that status tag to be updated. ...And add the still working Itch page, current link seems to be dead.

An