(EDIT AT BOTTOM) I have a lot of thoughts about this game. I have played Progress Knight (the original), Progress Knight 2, and Progress Knight Reborn. I personally enjoyed Progress Knight 2 the most due to the extended progress, and I would expect this game to follow suit, being an extension of that game.
However, I have several main issues: Firstly, the progression is far too automated in the beginning. It would be significantly better if everything being automated was through upgrades rather than being already automatic. (For example, you might be able to spend evil perk points to automate individual skills permanently, or have a bar like the other skills that upgrades with diminishing returns, but is kept on evil/enlightenment.)
Next is Faint Hope. It genuinely drags the game to a halt, and kills my motivation to play it. I was genuinely enjoying the game somewhat at the 15-400k essence point, as I could reset whenever I needed to, but Faint Hope just makes the game such a slog. It makes it so you can only actually make progress a few times per day, and it's such a horrible timewall "feature" to put in a game like Progress Knight.
I do have some positive things to say, though. The automation is obviously bad when it's automating the MAIN PROGRESSION, but once you're at the good part of enlightenment, where you reset frequently, it is beneficial. That is definitely one thing the original was missing, it was just implemented too early in progression in this one.
Next, evil perk points are a really beneficial QoL feature, and while I think the celestial unlock time upgrade should be moved to be in the enlightenment stage, I think they're a beneficial feature to the gameplay.
Challenges are also a nice feature, and there's even some strategy with selecting high happiness jobs and items and pausing the game before you end the happiness challenge.
(If you, for some reason, are reading all of this, thank you for putting thought to my ramblings. I like Progress Knight, and almost all its forks, but I just can't stand a lot of the parts of this game.)
The inactive nature of the game also cuts down on the slog of certain points in Progress Knight 2, but there are better ways of doing that than automating everything far before you're done with it in the progression.
Ultimately, I cannot recommend you play this game past Faint Hope. Which is where almost all the new content is. Should I ever somehow learn to code, I might make my own fork which fixes the issues I have with this game.
EDIT:
I've played this game quite a bit more than when I made this review. The game isn't horrible, but it's not a Progress Knight game in any way but the title, and if you're looking for more Progress Knight after completing the other games, this is not the place to go looking for it. Faint Hope wasn't as awful as I remembered when I wrote this review, but there are many points where this is just a game you check in on every hour or so to get to do something.
The higher reset layers are fine, I guess, but the second one after Essence reeks of sci-fi keyword abuse.
As far as the things I've enjoyed since my first review, the last EPP upgrade/buyable is definitely nice, and kind of makes the game "easier" but just provides some strategy in a way to end of the run.
Avoiding spoilers, the layer after Essence, which I'll call D, definitely has some missteps in it. First of all, you barely get much of an upgrade from it initially, and although its buyables certainly build up strength, it's a far cry from the previous layers. It doesn't really tell you about the milestone which drastically speeds up progress, either, so I thought I would have to painstakingly grind it out to get anywhere, only reaching it in a specific push to see what it was.
The midstage of D is fine, I guess. It's fairly grindy, but not as timewally, which is definitely not a great combination. Eventually, you reach the second layer after, which I'll call M.
Like I said previously, M reeks of sci-fi buzzwords, and definitely doesn't fit the Progress Knight theming at all. Its basic system is actually fairly nice, not having a currency at first, but rather a generating currency that is stuck to a limit. I think the feature is fairly nice, but it gets a bit repetitive, and until like e28 limit, there's not much of a reason to go beyond the Essence requirement for it.
The next major step through it is MP, which I think were executed fairly well, if not a bit annoying to repeatedly set up and change throughout a run. That's about where I've made it so far.
My final feelings about this game are that it's not a Progress Knight game. It's an incremental/idle game wearing the skin of Progress Knight, and takes away all player agency through the early game. If you want to play it, complete a save on Progress Knight 2.0, and import it here once you're done, that way you at least have agency until you bridge the gap to the game's new content.