[Review of finished game despite the tag.] The full game was finished in April 2026 and was a rewarding ~week (the dev says in their reddit thread that it's 10-25 hours of playtime; I played intermittently). At heart it's a fill-the-bars looper, with completed actions giving you skill experience (raising your stats to make actions using that stat more efficient), items which can be used within that same loop to add efficiency, or perks which automatically apply to every loop within an ascension. Fairly quickly you unlock a perk which allows you a limited item cache between runs, and switching between item/no-item runs becomes essential to let you push a little farther. Ascension is the prestige mechanic and gives you access to a limited number of permanent upgrades.

My impression of the final version is of a tightly polished and well-balanced game with a lot of ambient storytelling in the various actions you undertake. It's rare to go 15 minutes without unlocking something new (and if you do, it's generally a sign to ascend), and the boss mechanic lets you unlock new actions within an existing zone to add freshness even to thoroughly explored areas. Consistently engaging, with a surprising amount of agency and interactibility given the limited number of choices -- even when you're hitting walls it always feels like you have multiple routes forward (intensively train skills toward a perk, train combat toward a boss, push to the next zone, or farm ascensions are almost always all viable options). I save 5-star ratings for genre classics worthy of replay, but I genuinely can't find anything to critique here beyond nitpicks; this is definitely a high 4 and worth your time.