Cradle of the Dark Brood

This dev uses shady tactics to promote this game and I got deceived by him as well. Generative AI slop that was not self-reported to Steam page, he hides this fact about AI, which can be acknowledged only from other players' comments. The UI is garbage that uses default engine sprites, well just take a screenshot and go ask your AI how to improve it if you have absolutely zero taste. This confirms why you show a big bright fps counter in a damn 2D game.

Had some good elements that made it compelling to play for a stretch but there is way way too much idle time. Of course a lot of the idle time can be avoided if you figure out the systems and just abuse very poor prestige mechanics but then your 'play' time is not really worthwhile. I was very impressed with the potential here living within a very clean UI but ultimately there are way too many stats and systems that exist for their own sake and add nothing meaningful to the gameplay. I kind of feel like I was hoodwinked into thinking this was a really great game for the past few days.

Honestly, this is a very light, borderline broken game. The premise seems interesting on paper, you breed little critters, watch them get stronger, cooler, ect. The issue boils down to how functionally broken half of the systems are, along with the plot basically not existing, only drip fed via little text blurbs as you fight through more areas. Oh, and honestly my worst gripe? NO OFFLINE PROGRESS, THE GAME MUST BE OPEN TO ADVANCE AT ALL.

Pretty boring to be honest. A lot of sitting around waiting for things to happen, and the things happening aren't particularly interesting (thinking of the combat mainly).

There's about two days of content in this interesting combination of incremental mechanics woven together with a lightweight story. The mechanics are novel, and combine in interesting ways, but the execution feels like it robs some of the gameplay significance from them. For an example, you breed your creatures, selecting them based on 5 different stats that improve with each generation and affect the creature in different ways to make them suitable for different tasks. This sounds cool, but any thoughts of specializing on certain roles as a gameplay mechanic is immediately undercut by the fact that you kinda need all five equally for independent requirements, so there's no way that having high intelligence meaningfully compensates for a shortfall of dexterity. You just need to be good at everything. Specialization isn't rewarded. Then in fairly short order you automate selecting for higher stats, and that just looks at sum total stats, so you can't even specialize if you wanted. So the five numbers really just collapse down to the average power number, the importance of stats for different roles pretty much disappears into meaninglessness, and brute-forcing generations becomes …

Very fun game the concept is neat and while it might not give you exactly what your expecting it gives you some very suprsingly cool things