Increlution

Fun game but abandoned due to developer health issues. At this point it's been longer without an update than it was being actively updated.
That said, did I get a couple of quid's worth of enjoyment out of the content that's there? Yes. It's good value for money, but unfortunately in an unfinished state.
On balance I'm giving it a thumbs up because even with that unfinished state it's still value for money, and enjoyable. But with the strong caveat that if you want the narrative to be finished and completing games is important to you, it may leave you annoyed.
The game itself is an interesting visual-novelesque incremental based around automating your path through a choose-your-own-adventure style story, with each loop giving you bonuses to the completed steps. This approach exposes some interesting mechanics compared to many other idler/incremental games, some of which end up having important counter-intuitive ramifications as you get deeper into the game.
This makes it a bit more thoughtful than some other incrementals, but can also lead to frustration when in the later stages multiple counter-intuitive mechanics end up trapping you in a situation where the fact that you're improving actually makes your progress harder. Once you figure these bumps in the road out and change your strategy it stops being an issue, but I suspect many people, after having been trained by multiple hours of gameplay that "getting better is getting better" are going to be a little miffed by the feeling of "getting better now appears actively harmful, and your goal is getting further away on each loop".
Some of this could be mitigated by some tutorialisation or a smoother introduction of the new concepts, but unfortunately most of this is in the final couple of chapters of the game which were the last updates before things dried up, so it may never happen - and it's possible a number of users will give up in frustration and feel the game has been left in a broken state rather than merely an unfinished one.
Hopefully I'll be proven wrong and once the developer returns to health they'll return to development, but reading of the old devblogs talking of 80+ hour weeks, I doubt (and honestly hope) that such an unsustainable pace belongs firmly in the past.

I suppose I should get around to leaving a review for this game since I have almost 600 hours in it. It's more than worth the price if you enjoy games that make numbers go up, whether that's idle games, roguelites, or rpgs. Buy this and enjoy.

A tentative reccomendation. The game is abandoned by the dev and will never be finished, but there's enough content right now to have fun, and the core idea is rather unique for an incremental game. It's $3.99, and that's about the correct price for the state the game is currently in, in my opinion.

About the first three to four chapters were *chef smooch for this genre. By Chapter 6, the slog had begun in earnest. I gassed out ultimately at Chapter 9. This really feels like a game that didn't know when to quit.
Sigh... I think I still have to recommend it because even the first four chapters were worth the price of admission.

Written December 23rd 2024 Game price at writing: $3.99
I've apparently have this game running for over 3000 hours now, and found it funny I've not had words to describe why I love the game. It reminds me a bit of playing "Choose your own adventure" books as a youth. The game is mostly text based, and is about making choices to proceed in your adventure. You are doomed to die, but every run you gain skills, and learn more about the paths you are choosing. Run again, learn a bit more, and repeat.
And repeat, and repeat... but each chapter gets a little more interesting, and your skills allow you to race through previous chapters until they are nothing but a blink of an eye to get through. automation aids in this process, and after repeating actions enough times, you don't have to consciously choose to do them anymore: just tell the game you want to do them automatically from then on.
Until finally you are faced with a great foe in Chapter 11 (the current end of the game) which is an encounter unlike any other you've faced in all the previous game, but again you can choose your path through, and learn, and as always, repeat, gaining skills each time, until finally you fell the great foe, and with satisfaction, you are at... the end?
But no, you get to then choose some fun perks, and go again in NG+ mode. unlike most NG+ games, the repeated game is actually a little easier because of your new perks, while you don't really suffer any increase in difficulty. Instead, the challenge is trying to do it all again, in fewer loops, with smater paths to victory, until you stand victorious once again... and yet once again, you repeat.... endlessly getting just a little better... and suddenly you've been running over 3000 hours of loops... again and again, endless enjoyment, all for just a few dollars.
So... do I recommend? Yes, most empathatically, yes. I don't know if the game will really get still more updates. The Dev says yes, that they have tons of plans to continue, but it has been almost 2 years since the last chapters came out, and it is hard to say for sure just how much more the game will grow, but it is so... SO much worth it already, that I don't need more to recommend this game. I hope you'll give it a try, and enjoy!

UPDATE: I've changed my review to a thumbs up for two reasons. First, the game's "push for progression" mechanic is addictive and I can't stop playing it. And second, many of the critical reviews, mine included, talk about the shortcomings of this game as an "idler". But in fact the game developer never once uses the term "idle" in the game description, but instead clearly refers to this as a pure incremental game. Many of the reviews, both positive and negative, use the term "idler" to refer to this game. And "idler" is the second most common "player-based tag" applied to the game (by players). So I think a lot of people seeing this game for the first time are assuming it is intended to be an idler game (as I did), when in fact it is clearly intended to be an active incremental game.
Imagine that one thousand players simply decided to tag this game as a "first person shooter", despite the developer's own description stating otherwise, it would make little sense for me to give it a thumbs down because it is a poor FPS. I believe my original review did something similar, emphasizing how this game really doesn't hold up as an "idler". As an "active incremental", however, this game and the developer's work deserves a thumbs up.
original review
I'm really torn by this one. It scratches the push-for-progression itch, but there are a lot of blockers to this being "fun". I'll try to explain:
Technically, this can be called an idle game, but the game mechanics really stretch the meaning of "idle". In the game, you are trying to make it through 11 "chapters", each of which has an increasing number of "tasks" within it. (Chapter 1 has 24 tasks, chapter 2 has 36 tasks, chapter 3 has 41 tasks, etc.) Each task takes an amount of time which is determined by your stats in a related skill. (For example, you "cook crabs" faster if your "cooking" skill stat is higher, etc.) The longer (or more often) you do a task, the (slightly) higher your corresponding skill stat becomes.
BUT THESE TASKS ARE NOT AUTOMATED until you've completed them a certain number of times. And since most tasks appear only once in its specifically assigned chapter, it means you'll need to replay the chapter several times to automate that one task. And the tasks are essentially sequential, so you'll need to complete the first one to be able to do the second one (although there are a few "forked" tasks which offer a choice, like "fight vs. flee", but these forks always converge again after a task or two.)
So you manually start the task and wait for it to complete. Maybe you'll wait 1 to 5 minutes. Once that task is complete, THE GAME STOPS until you manually trigger the next task. At its core, this game is about getting those tasks automated, so that you don't have to manually start them and wait for them to complete. This game is basically a very very long list of nearly identical tasks which you are striving to automate.
As you play and replay and replay the chapter, your list of automated tasks grows. But the game will always STOP when it runs into an unautomated task. So, the game may in fact "idle" for a while, but it can only idle for a very short while. I'm talking about MINUTES, not hours.
For example, according to Steam, I have about 230 hours of playtime in this game. During that time, I have played actively, pushing it along several times each day, and have automated 109 tasks. This means the game will "idle" through those 109 tasks without my intervention. But in game time, ALL of these 109 tasks, when automated, complete in just under 21 minutes. Just to clarify: After 230 hours of game play, this game now idles for only 21 minutes. Then it STOPS. So I then have to manually push it along to the next task I am trying to automate, wait for that task to end, move on to the next, etc.
To give you an idea of how often this game stops, the game itself (in game settings) considers only non-stopped time as "timed played". And according to the game, I have a "total time played" of a little over 56 hours. In other words, the game has only played 56 hours out of the 230 hours I've had it actively running. The game was stopped (not IDLE!) for those other 174 hours, despite my checking it several times every day to push it along. The game's Steam store page states is has "220 hours of unpaused content". Unpaused, of course, means non-stopped. At my current rate, this means approx 920 hours of (Steam) playtime to reach 220 hours of (game) unpaused time. I have played many other idle games for far longer than 920 hours, so that duration isn't a problem. What IS a problem is that for 700 of those 920 hours this game will be stopped/paused.
And this is why the game, although technically an idle game, is not really an idle game.
And just one final observation/complaint I need to mention. While you are doing all of the above, your "adventurer" has a health bar, which slowly depletes. Your max health is slightly incremented each time you die (when health reaches zero) and you "reincarnate" (back to the start of chapter one, task one). Your health depletion can be mitigated through certain tasks (like eating food or building shelter), but in essence, the rate of your "health decay" increases slightly each second, making your lifespan amazingly short. This means your main effort of getting through the immediate sequence of tasks (to get them automated!) is severely curtailed by the increasing speed at which your health is dropping to zero.
The primary way to alleviate your encroaching death is to eat food (which you've either gathered or cooked in a previous task). So even early on, your inventory will contain a vast array of edibles which you must continuously shove into your face simply to survive for a few more seconds. I know this is just a numbers game, so on the one hand, "who cares?". But after a while you cannot help but realize that this game is ultimately about an out-of-control metabolism which becomes so ravenous that you must eat anything and everything you can get your hands on -- dogs, cats, children -- just to have enough energy to walk a half mile down the street. The game's depiction of your adventurer quickly becomes absurd. You will literally die from metabolic exhaustion (again and again and again and again) as you simply walk down the street or talk to some dude. Alternative names for the game could seriously include: "Metabolic Apocalypse" or "Ozempic Half-life". (I'm not kidding about eating cooked camels every 4 seconds just to stay alive long enough to pick another banana, which of course will also immediately go in your pie-hole if you don't die before it gets there.)
I opted for a thumb-down because this cost money and now appears to be abandoned or in limbo. (The game has been untouched with no developer updates for 18 months or so.) If the store page's description of what this game was intended to include is correct, its means the current content is less than half of what was envisioned. But if chapters 12 through 25 ever materialize, my (uneducated) guess is that they will contain more of the same and will simply increase the list of similar sequential tasks. If the pause mechanic was not so prevalent and the idle duration was actually meaningful (rather than a hindrance) I would easily give this a thumbs-up despite its cost and being in limbo.

An auto-battler against progress bars.
I'm giving this a reluctant thumbs up given this is what it is. Its not a lot of things and if you are expecting it to be those things, you'll be disappointed.
It's has more in common with the classic Progress Quest than it does with other games... though you can interact with this more than progress quest.
One problem with it is a "oh, that's it?" with the ending. There's the promise of more content... and then you look at the last update and that this is still in early access.
So, is it worth the price? Kind of. That's where I'm giving it a "yes" rather than a "no". For what it is, its an interesting idea. I don't regret buying it. There are unsatisfying parts to it. Part of the game is the exploration / unlocking of the next part and its prestige system is... eh, ok. Not entirely satisfying though at the same time, not sure how else it could be done without making it even less satisfying.
And thus I return to the "is it ok for what it costs?" And that gets a "yea." Will it be better if there's an update? Probably. Will there be an update? That is the domain of speculation for those more involved in the community than I.