If I had to describe it with one word, it would be “overwhelming”.

The aesthetic is there, really polished for what the game is going for. Even the particle systems are characters, and it’s very immersive in that area. It’s a simple but polished theme. That’s a solid plus for me, even if I'm not a fan of the aesthetic I can tell the developer put in real effort and didn’t just slap on a lazy CRT shader hoping the game would look better than what it is. The game’s aesthetic is well made even without the CRT shader.

However, that aesthetic has a huge downside. I was playing for about 10 minutes feeling very confused, and I didn’t really know what I was doing. Everything looks the same because it’s all black and white. There are so many buttons, and they all look identical. This aesthetic doesn’t match how complicated the game is, because all windows look the same, all lists look the same, and all buttons, options, tabs, and menus look the same. There is also a lot of information on the screen, which can be very overwhelming for new players. Even the machines are confusing. I don’t really know what they mean or what they do. I just know the manager (worker?) goes from machine to machine and somehow characters pop up, and I think I need to combine them, but I can also sell them.

It is a unique concept, I’ll give you that, and it’s worth checking out just to see it. But for me, this extremely simple aesthetic ultimately adds an entry barrier. Maybe the game should start smaller, for example by only presenting a factory and upgrades. There’s no need to present everything at the very start of the gameplay, especially since you won’t be able to change character sets, you won’t be able to buy other factories, and changing the factory name is unnecessary early on. I’d argue that you need to ease new players in with simple mechanics and gradually show or enable new features as they progress through the game.

Hope it helps!