I enjoy time loopers. I wanted to like this variant -- and kudos to the author for trying something new, with the rock-clearing mechanic to unearth the map and give a new mechanism for permanent progress over time. Unfortunately, the game locked into a few design decisions that made this more frustrating than fun for me.

The biggest of these was the way that rock difficulty scaled as you removed them. Combined with the fact that all interactible objects are hidden underneath rocks, this means that if you don't know the optimal order from out-of-game knowledge like a guide, you're setting yourself up for a frightfully grindy experience. If there's only one "right" way to play and otherwise you stall out on time walls, then the player needs to be able to experiment and rewind and refine their move paths -- but once a (non-white) rock is mined, it's mined for good and the penalty for having cleared it locks in. Being that harshly penalized for not following the guide is a big discouragement to engagement.

Not knowing what was under the rocks in advance also removed the ability to make meaningful decisions, which is the core of looper gameplay. Contrast with, say, the first area of Stuck In Time, where you have fireflies, a rat, and an altar, and depending on the order in which you interact with them, you make different sorts of progress, and you need to start bootstrapping by playing around with them in different orders. Notably, as you accumulate permanent progress, the optimal route for that first region changes -- getting all the fireflies at once is foolish at first since they can only refill mana up to your cap, but to raise your cap, you need to kill the rat and then reach the altar, which you can't do at the start without getting one firefly to account for the time spent moving. So you start out going back and forth to use your firefly reserve a bit at a time, and then once you've gained enough walk efficiency to kill the rat first, you can remove some of your back-and-forth to make your trip to the altar more efficient, and then once you've really gained some levels you can do the rat and altar first and then hit the fireflies all at once to refill to your new higher cap. It's a fantastic puzzle because it makes your progress feel real and meaningful, forces you to continually re-optimize based on your new progress, and lets you juggle several elements right at the beginning. Here, once you've found an optimal path to get to the first NPC, nothing changes other than desperately trying to accumulate ROCK levels to minimize how much you're falling behind the rocks' scaling, and you're not even accumulating the ability to walk faster or harvest flowers meaningfully faster -- there's just no interactivity other than uncovering yet another rat you can't pet because you're running out of energy too fast to cash it in. (Not to mention, the guide tells you to stop leveling your skills...)

I think the framework is here to make a great game, but it might take a design overhaul to get there, thinking about the principles of what makes looper games work. At any time you should be able to reset your game state to recover from penalties caused by information gathering. All of your progress should feel meaningful, giving you small accumulated bonuses even if you were going after something that you can't immediately accomplish (Stuck In Time does this by leveling up your familiarity with each individual square, giving you freedom to brute force through a lot of its puzzles if you keep throwing time into paths that just barely fall short of your available resources; Cavernous doesn't, forcing you to optimize exactly as intended to get past its bottlenecks, and this is a big reason I think Stuck In Time is a better-designed game). You should have multiple objectives at any given time and be able to choose between them, encouraging experimentation. And you should always have enough information to make those decisions -- "left rock vs. right rock" isn't actually a choice, "uncover a resource vs. uncover an NPC" is. omsi's Idle Loops is another good template for how hidden information might be handled -- it only uncovers game elements when you've reached certain thresholds at preceding elements, but it tells you what those thresholds are, and there are always multiple new objectives to choose between unlocking.

It would also be great to speed the game up, either globally or via a time bank which auto-applies when it has time cached and auto-accumulates when you're not spending motivation. (I do see there's a statistic to sped up gameplay, but that looks to be a late-game thing; I gave up mid-blue rocks.)

Anyway, I do look forward to seeing what this becomes and hope to re-review it after some revisions. (This is based on the December 2025 version.)