The End Grows

Very nice game for a solo dev ! Seems clunky at first, but you soon get addicted and the 5 minutes loop make you want to do "one more and I go to bed" .... and it's 2AM, but you are now level 43254 which is nice. 5/5 will end the world again.

this game has some serious potential. im only a few hours into the experience but i do plan to play more and re-review when i'm done. what looks like a slow paced incremental is actually a fast paced choices made on the fly action packed skill test.

This game is actually great. While one run is like 5 minutes. It's more like every run is 'Just five more minutes'. The game has a great way of making you think you're SUPER close to beating it, but around every turn it just kinda becomes bigger. You could say that the ending grows. I am nowhere near beating It I think. And I've played for a few hours at this point. it's a great combo of incremental, fighter, action, exploration and puzzle.

[b]The End Grows[/b] applies the incremental exploration structure and exponential leveling system of games like [b]Our Ascent[/b] (or more accurately the prototypical [b]Inflation RPG[/b], but that isn't on Steam) to a metroidvania. The gamefeel is overall very stiff & unpolished-feeling and the aesthetic is best described as an acquired taste, but that concept works incredibly well at a broad level and results in a gameplay loop so compelling that I can overlook the game's rough edges. I can't say how easy it will be for others to do the same because I'm already pretty deep down the rabbithole of the specific micro-genre of exponential incremental rpgs of which this game is an evolutionary branch, but there really isn't anything else like The End Grows out there so imo it's worth taking a chance on. If the dev iterates on this concept with more polish and an artstyle that has broader appeal then I think they'll have a breakout hit on their hands!

This is mostly a fast-paced metroidvania / action-platformer, rather than an incremental roguelike like you might think -- mechanical skill and planning are required, and you won't be able to beat it easily via just grinding up the meta upgrades. Once you've gotten into that, this is a pretty good game -- there's a lot of thought put into the planning, and the level design is pretty cool. I like the enemy designs as well, and the story's not too bad at all. (I'm only at the start of Chapter 5, which I don't think is too far into the game, so I'm not sure how different it gets.) It's incentivized to search the map all over to collect secrets, so there's a bunch of points of interest, keeping it from feeling like you're just bashing your head into the same wall over and over. There is some jank that gives me some reservations, though -- namely that A) your only weapon requires you to constantly spam the attack button to deal damage, and that B) there's a lack of tutorial for the Dash feature, which led to me getting stuck for an hour before I eventually looked it up and realized that you can actually dash upwards. (Seriously, if you play this game, remember that.) The lack …

It's terrible for Steam to allow such crappy titles at those cost on its catalogue. It plays horribly bad(floaty, janky hitboxes), and the art/game design gave me straight up nausea.