On the surface, this game is an absolute trainwreck. But buried underneath is something surprisingly solid.

When you load the game you're thrown into an enormous and somewhat janky interface with no guidance. (The Help screen holds your hand through the first 15 seconds of gameplay.) The Help screen warns you that the game may be unstable due to the three devs disagreeing; the news ticker occasionally makes a joke(?) about this being buggy due to AI; text regularly overflows from its bounding boxes; the story is buried inside cutscenes launched from menus; the topmost tab in the navbar isn't the main game, but an entirely separate dungeon exploration game with no keyboard equivalent for the onscreen arrow key buttons; and within an hour of launching the game you're decoding Euler sums to understand how your upgrades work. I absolutely would not blame anyone for running screaming.

But the main game, which loosely follows an Antimatter Dimensions-style model, quickly unfolds into a number-go-up exercise with good interactivity and balancing. As of this post I'm mid-chapter 3, with chapters 0 and 1 about an hour each and chapter 2 about a day to complete; chapter 2 is where the mechanics start branching out to juggle multiple elements per prestige, including challenges as well as various mathematical constructions to collectively boost your numbers. (Chapter 3 includes a chess board, in a nod to the old story about the king who learned a lesson in exponentiation due to a mathematician requesting a doubling amount of grain on each square.) There's never any hand-holding, but each individual element does explain what it does, and in a worst-case scenario you can always just buy what you can afford, since all of it contributes to progress.

I kind of have to review the dungeon (and skill tree, and cores element) separately, because it's an almost entirely unconnected game which you can play to acquire Time Cores (freemium currency) and modest boosts to overall game speed. Aside from the aggravating click-only interface, it would be worthwhile as an incremental game of its own -- killing monsters for equipment (core) drops, which you can go to the Cores screen to equip into one of three active slots in order to boost your stats and make more progress per run, until you attack something which reduces your HP to zero, at which point you reset and earn a few skill points you can spend in the Skill tree for statistic bonuses. The map is full of tricks -- keys to acquire to unlock doors, as well as walls with secret doors (which would be more fun if the interface was smoother, since the only way to find them is to try walking into each wall square one by one) and invisible walls (which are just un-fun and make me wonder if there are some bugs in the maps). I enjoyed this part of the game more than I expected, especially since it gave me something to do while I was waiting for the main game to accumulate Number when I was pushing for progress. I still haven't figured out how the enemies scale, but even in its rough-edged state this adds an interesting puzzle dimension to the game.

At any rate, if you've got a bit of patience for trial-and-error gameplay and mathematical formulae, this is worth a try.