Deep Sea Idle: Infinity Abyss

Idle & Incremental Lovers recommends Deep Sea Idle: Infinity Abyss. [i] This is one of the good ones, guys! Respect for your time, various layers of progression, interesting upgrades, roguelike run-based one-in-three choices, smooth and elegant aesthetic and movement. :-) [/i] + Upgrades never feel superfluous. They improve your economy, movement, durability... and bring new weapon mechanics to the table: plasma beams, explosions, lightning... Overall, the pacing is really good and it takes about 3 hours to finish the whole game (achievements not included). + It starts as a pretty cozy mining game and ends up with screen-filling chain reactions. Power creep and dopamine are real! - Neon aesthetic is great. + Depending on the order in which you randomly find powerful relics, you might want to favor some ugrades that synergise with the ones you possess. + This is mainly an incremental game, but I like how it features an interesting idle mechanic: you can upgrade two kinds of aquarium fishes (miners and collectors) that passively give you a currency that level up your star multiplier (stars are your main resource). +/- I have a minor gripe with the prestige system. You don't get to al…

Like any good incremental game, the core gameplay revolves around a simple mechanic that is fun enough. Here, you control a submarine that follows your mouse cursor and automatically attacks anything that enters its attack radius. Your only job is to guide it toward enemies and collect the resources they drop. Those resources are then invested into a classic upgrade tree that steadily makes you stronger and more efficient. As always, you begin with a single visible upgrade in the middle of the tree while everything else remains hidden. Buying an upgrade for the first time reveals all the nodes connected to it. Purchasing one of those newly revealed upgrades then uncovers even more, and this continues until you've gradually exposed the entire tree. It creates a nice sense of discovery because you never know what new ability or mechanic you'll unlock next. Some upgrade nodes can be purchased multiple times, with their maximum level shown when you hover your cursor over them. Hovering also reveals exactly what each upgrade does. At first, you'll improve basic stats such as damage, firing range, enemy spawn rate, and resource gain. Later on, you'll unlock entirely new attacks, includ…

Very satisfying incremental game. The first time you are forced to reset it feels like a setback, but once you get a bit further in, you really start to get the dopamine rush you wanted.

nice short incremental with good progression. well done. worth your bucks.

At first, it seemed pretty simple, but the more upgrades I unlocked, the more I wanted to see what combinations I could come up with next. The chain reaction explosions are really satisfying, and before I knew it, I'd been playing much longer than I expected.

Firstly, it's a short one. Hit the end screen at 2 hr 47 min after about 110 dives. What makes this sting all the more is that there is an achievement for playing for 2 hours, as if to remind you that you can no longer refund. The dives are quite limited, only lasting 12 seconds to start, slowly growing to 2+ minutes, so progress feels slow at first. The only 'gameplay' is moving the ship around to be in range to shoot the shapes, or to avoid pumping into them (they don't even do any attacks to dodge). All attacks are automated, if you're in range you shoot the wiremesh rock. And most of your damage eventually comes from the enemies deathrattle. Kills give you exp, and upon level up you get the standard 3 random cards for perks. This is fun at first, but when you're towards the end you're doing this 20+ times every. single. dive. Would have been nice to get fewer but more impactful perks as you level up in tier. This also puts a dampener on your build every dive. For example, the laser beam is nearly useless until you get several perks for it. Every new tier I was hoping it would open up more, but it never happened. It's short, and has it's flaws. For this, I can't recommend.