itch.io

Now that it's been a while, I have a """bit""" more feedback regarding things regarding the incremental layer of the game: I realized the portion of the game where decryption is a useful reason to level INTELLIGENCE is shorter than even scavenging speed for PERCEPTION; the logs just kinda end quickly. I think their pacing is great, there just really aren't a lot of them to last past mid-game, especially with how you don't really need a lot of INTELLIGENCE to breeze through all of them. While INTELLIGENCE does have a resurgence with Aberrant mass, you're really mostly just gated by the scarcity rather than the rate, so it's less effective than you would think.

Scavenging, as I said, is pretty underdeveloped, but here is how I think you fix it: make Items have diminishing rarity the more you have (perhaps representing scarcity and how you really do consume everything available) to incentivize doing PERCEPTION builds more than just once per one or two areas as soon as you hit the 100% threshold and never have to return again (though I think items should be more potent so that even incremental bonuses are actually worth doing an extra run for) or/and just adding a third, late game multiplicative boost to Combat Stats in every area that would require far higher PERCEPTION to get and be gated (to disincentivize just going AFK and using the law of large numbers) to late-game by a secondary stat requirement and/or a hard-to-get trigger in a later area, similarly to unlocking the resonance blaster. That being said, any tweaking to the fine-tuned items would almost definitely make them too strong, so you would need to increase the difficulty of area 6 to compensate - that's just a minor tweak, though.

I will preface this next section by saying that I don't want to give off an impression that any of this is an obligation to implement, but I do think they address actual flaws; Biotomata fails to tie together some loose ends, namely in regards to late-game progression.

Have you ever considered fleshing out content the fact that you need not necessarily have all your parts (e.g. Psuedopodia, Lobopods, Hepatopancreas) to be on the same tier; for instance, allowing Anthropoid to be unique, rather than just being fancy Complex? I think it would add depth, be immersive (in the sense that the ending considers your choices (more than it already does, don't get me wrong)), and, assuming you don't grant these 'sub-stages' unique upgrades, very difficult, as a nice challenge for those who seek it. That being said, I do think the original endings do cover most of your bases, since a hypothetical Anthropoid ending would be very similar to Complex's, so instead, I propose this:

The game is at its strongest, and what makes it a good game rather than just a good story, is when it can explore the consequences of a constantly-mutating, constantly-adapting blob-thing being controlled by a player that can try again and again, learning from its mistakes and experimenting with every new attempt; the first time we beat area 6 and unlock an ending, (minor tangent: speaking of areas, I was surprised that the game ended at area 6 for my first play-through (1A) since usually games with grey goos let you at least ruin (the surface and/or biosphere of) a planet but I acknowledge that it'd be weird for anything that isn't specifically ending 1A, but it'd be fun in the same way noticing that full eldritch gives you an absurd amount of stats that even the cube root of would be obscenely excessive and the barely-bridled ecstatic anticipation of such delirious power being used) the main hook of the game (exploring and figuring out the expanse of this labyrinth as the volume we explore in every new area grows exponentially) switches to finding out what happens if we act differently, losing that constantly-adapting aspect and emphasizing the experimentation, but it loses steam in this regard towards the ending, since you literally get a binary choice: be Evil or be Good (and in the case of eldritch, you're forced into the third path of Ascended-beyond-your-puny-mortality) which works against the hook of experimentation. So, instead, what if we could explore the gradient between those choices?

We find new sub-stages that aren't purely eldritch, purely corrupted, or purely normal; for example, perhaps a 5B-esque ending put into 4B, where "Novelle" would be excessively 'proactive' in 'dealing' with human conflicts? (Conceptually, that is; to be clear: I don't think making it a surprise half-way through would be the best, as playing on the tension that you would get from having the background or some other notable feature being different but the ending being not appearing different (for now) would be a far better choice in my opinion). Being able to explore not only the relation between normal/corruption, but corruption/eldritch and (I think most interestingly, and why the concept had stuck itself in my head from my original comment) normal/eldritch (since the only thing that could compare against something so unstoppable is the unstoppable human spirit, in its uncountable forms yet unified under a singular purpose, as cheesy as that is in this phrasing); how Daniel would even survive the eldritch monstrosity in even its weaker incarnations is left as an exercise for the reader.

Of course, leaving all of this to be discovered by half pure happenstance and half reading the achievements is tedious and immersion breaking; but for this, you already have the solution: archives. Tasks fall off relevancy as they get completed and aren't difficult even when you do, so adding late-game tasks that require effort and planning rather than just time, make them hard to crack so INTELLIGENCE is useful again, and drip-feed a third series of logs that would complete the the trio of normal/green/Daniel corrupted/red/Astrid and eldritch/purple/??? (perhaps 'management' or some other similarly unique to match eldritch's tones, though I'm unsure that more detail on management would be a good thing) and serve guide the player to what they perhaps have missed 'between the cracks' just like how the eldritch is from the crack(s) in reality and how the sub-forms are between the cracks of the defined form (this would, incidentally, give a purpose to being able to collapse the logs, since that feature is languishing in obscurity considering that ~90% of the logs can be shown at once).

The reason why I feel that I should bring up these concepts is really just because the game slips at the very end, especially at the thematic level – which is really quite the worst spot to do it (but also the most common, so don't take this as a critique of your capabilities), but not irreversibly, so it is seems well within reason that adding something that ties together the loose ends together and remedy issues that aren't necessarily apparent but still subtly diminish the experience seem well within reach, if you wish to build upon this product and improve it (which I assume you do, or at least in regards future products since you've been very receptive in this place of feedback), I think this would be at the very least a (hopefully) good starting point.

Glad you made it all the way through, all typographical errors are my own et cetera et cetera, but I have just one more thing left (this time, that is, reply to this at your own peril): 

please make the endings make each stage have its own column that holds its routes instead of all of them in one giant row it would look so much better pretty please i am metaphorically begging.