Played the playtest version available on the itch.io page. This shows promise, but it could use further cooking.

The first area improvements would help is in clarity, especially at the start of the game. Pick up a couple pieces of trash by following the starting tooltips and then your kraken sinks into the ocean and a fish shows up with two icons, a rotating arrow and a... piece of broken glass? The arrow lets you replay the level to add to your trash stockpile, and the thingy takes you to your undersea lair. At that lair, you can go right into an empty screen where your collected trash is floating, or down into the abyss for the upgrade tree. You can't interact with the upgrade tree except for the top icon, the "plastic clam", which slowly transforms your trash into the pearls which are used to buy the rest of your upgrades. But because the use of the clam isn't discussed in the game, and there is no way to track your collected trash (!) other than going into the cove and manually counting the pieces, it's entirely unclear how to progress at the start. Similarly, if you ever manage to completely clear a screen, the kraken will confront a net full of trash with a little sword tooltip -- and then you click on the net and the level ends, with nothing changed except for a new upgrade being available in the abyss. In order to progress you have to buy this new upgrade and then clear the level again. There's something to be said for discovery gameplay but right now the interface feels hostile.

But right now the biggest thing holding it back is balancing issues. There are some upgrades which are virtually useless -- such as the speed increase for the clam, which takes your trash processing cycle down from... 2.80 seconds to 2.78 seconds. Yes, for the same price as doubling the clam's capacity, you can shave 0.02 seconds off of its processing time! The second speed upgrade gives you an 0.04 second discount, and it never further scales, so by the time you're processing 10 pearls at a time you're still waiting 2.6 seconds between pearl runs. But worse, in later game, you get stuck behind the completely unupgradable delay for the clam to spit out finished pearls one at a time, so no matter how many pieces of trash the clam sucks in at once, you get a trickle income of about one pearl per second. (In fact, there's no point in upgrading above 7 pearls per run, because that will already outpace your output capacity.) This means that the gameplay quickly transitions into collecting several hundred pieces of trash with a 15-second run on the surface, and then being forced to idle for 5 minutes as they process. It's a thoroughly un-fun time gating and the final version of the game really needs to massage that aspect out.

The end of the playtest/demo is about ten levels down, and the final upgrade of several of the columns gives a fairly substantial boost which helps the game catch up with the scaling of the surface clutter, but currently it slows to a grind long before then.