Terraformental

Bit of a shorter off-schedule post but I just wanna shout out this cute little timeloop incremental idle-ish game that I played and finished in about 5 hours.

A little bit less spreadsheet than Universal Paperclips, but a little bit less visual than Idle Idle Game Dev. You play as a guy waking up from a cryo pod with no memories on an alien planet, and your goal is to survive, mostly by managing meters in that idle game like way. In general if one of your meters falls to 0, you just die, instantly.

Try and hold on for the prologue though, fix up your rover and reach An Event™ to trigger the time loop and start the game proper. Once you’re safe from your own inevitable mortality, the game opens up in two ways. Firstly, you can do a lot of tasks that will reveal information and unlock paths you can take in the next loop, as well as having certain tasks that don’t reset their progress between loops. And secondly, every task you complete raises your familliarity with that task, meaning that next time you do it, it’ll go faster. This buff can be the difference between dying at the doorstep of the next location in one loop, and making it on the next.

The game is in a super early state, only having a prologue and two chapters available at time of writing, and plans to add another chapter every couple months, but for a game in this early a state, it’s very well fleshed out and paced. Do expect a little bit of waiting though, some of the timers you’re actually expected to do (as in, the ones that arent blatantly jokes designed to waste time and kill you for making bad choices) may take anywhere from 3 to 6 minutes, so feel free to just have a second screen Bluesky open.

The game automatically pauses whilever you aren’t actively doing anything, which is a godsend as it gives you time to read logs and descriptions without the water meter ticking down. And lets be real, its the water that’s going to get you for pretty much the whole game lol.

Anyway, give it a go if you’re feeling bored.

Itch.io: https://sh4dowsand.itch.io/terraformental Free to play