I don't really know what to make of Cataclysm, which I've been playing off and on for something like seven or eight years at this point. It's engrossing and elaborate and fascinating to play, but it's also a horrendous slog full of pointless cruft, and it's cursed with a chaotic development process that I think will preclude the game ever really zeroing in on what I think is good about it.

My hottest take is that I don't think Cataclysm is a roguelike. Cata comes from that weird period, around the time FTL came out, when renewed interest in the genre led to people playing around with the boundaries and definitions of it, and I think that while at the time "roguelike" was a fair classification, the boundaries of the genre have (in my own opinion, anyway) pretty solidly coalesced around games with a distinct "run" that I think Cata lacks. It has progression, obviously, but lacking a final boss or any sort of definitive endgame scenario, it's never really aimed at anything, and as a result the only itch I ever really find it scratches is that of a more chaotic and wacky UnReal World with more inventory management.

There are a lot of things to like about Starbound. I think some of its features are better than Terraria--the grappling hook is far more interesting, and its furniture system & building diversity is incredible. But it's just fundamentally not as fun as Terraria. The environments feel one-dimensional; planets' surfaces have 90% of the work put into them, and meanwhile lava planet caves look identical to frozen planet caves. And that's not even getting into the story and worldbuilding having been thrown together kinda thoughtlessly (there is literally a subplot in the backstory about antivaxxers being right!)

An amusing concept for a game with some decent humor in it and a good aesthetic. This is unfortunately marred by its poor design; I could put up with the lack of i-frames after satiating a customer (true to life) and the questionable mechanic of hiding in employee rooms (the customers run way too fast for this tactic to be of much use, and going into them wastes time anyway), but I put the game down after I lost due to a customer request that I literally could not complete because the timer was shorter than the time it took to traverse the optimal route to my destination.

That said, I think the pitch and what already exists of the game has plenty of potential, and I'd be interested in a more fleshed-out realization of the game. It needs polish more than anything else.