Found the control gimmick intensely frustrating, kept accidentally skipping stuff I wanted to see when I didn’t actually blink no matter how many times I recalibrated. I think because I wear glasses the sensitivity needs to be super high to work at all, and consequently even the slightest movement of my long beautiful eyelashes set it off. Combined with my pretty chronic dry eye which makes me blink a lot anyway, the end result is a game that was pretty close to unplayable, and then when I decided to play it without eye tracking the last checkpoint was like ten minutes prior to when I quit and I just couldn’t be arsed anymore.

Classic Frankenstein game combining building/management, hack & slash dungeon crawling, and soft roguelike elements, creating a dense web of overlapping and complimentary systems which is very satisfying and compelling to get into. Combine this with a great visual style and a wicked sense of humour and initially I felt like this was a genuine 2022 Game of the Year contender.

And then the other shoe dropped. I would say, once you really get into it, each individual aspect of the game is quite shallow & the payoff for progress and mastery is rarely satisfying. I got all the way to the end and the brutally hard final boss fight, I felt, made some pretty wild assumptions about how much fun the player would still be having with the combat. Despite not being a truly massive game, you do feel the playtime by the end & there’s pretty much only just enough quality content to justify the length.

Combined with a design desperately in need of some quality of life improvements, overall I can only give a soft recommendation. And I absolutely couldn’t recommend it over more focused roguelites like Hades or management sims like Stardew Valley.