The demo for this game was fun and had a good balance. The full release added a bunch of new mechanics that totally ruined that balance and just makes everything too tedious. Upgrades are now locked behind completing requests first. And I find myself just chasing after request after request.

It gets to the point where I've completely forgotten about searching for a needle (and I neglect even the haystack itself because throughput has maxed out and I cannot upgrade it until more requests are completed). So instead of optimizing the basic haystack extraction loop, I'm focused on building superfluous factories purely for meeting the current request just so I can then build a higher tier of superfluous factories for the request after that. All the while space is too cramped for these superfluous factories and there always seems to be a shortage of power.

What am I even doing anymore? The game lost its charm that made it fun.

Not recommended in its current state

I was hoping for an incremental game where I could pick my own upgrades and figure out how I wanted to tackle the haystack. Instead, I spent most of my time following quests to unlock things I already knew I wanted.

The quests dictate when you can buy new equipment and even when you can upgrade things you already own. Then some upgrades hit their cap so quickly that the equipment feels only a little better than it did when you started. It’s frustrating to work through a quest chain for an upgrade and barely feel the difference once you get it.

That’s what surprised me most after seeing how many people played the demo. I didn’t play it myself, so I can only speak to the launch version, but how does the progression still feel this unbalanced and unrewarding after weeks of public playtesting? Some upgrades take a while to unlock and then barely anything happens.

I wanted to see how far I could get with hand tools, but most of my time went into setting up machines and routing conveyor belts. Even getting the factory running felt slow. I would’ve enjoyed it a lot more if there were better manual tools and enough room to upgrade them to make digging by hand worthwhile.

Then there’s night mode. What does it add? For me, it meant putting off an upgrade to buy lights just so I could see what I was doing. That made an already slow game feel even slower.

The price on its own wouldn’t bother me much, but it’s roughly twice what I’ve paid for similar incremental games. I’ve had more fun and more freedom with those, so I wouldn’t recommend this one right now.

finding a needle instead of finding a job

10/10