It's pretty clear this game was directly inspired by Kittens Game(looks like its actually inspired by A Dark Room, whoops. never played that one unfortunately, but my points here seem to apply all the same), a game I used to use a lot of my free time to play a while back. However, I think for me, the main problem I had with Kittens Game was that although it was fun and pretty interesting, without any graphics or polish at all it just became a little too dull, and I ended up giving up on it after a while for this reason. For me, this game is a brilliant improvement to the things Kittens Game had, adding all of the polish it was missing and innovating new features that make it so much more fun and unique.

The gameplay is really, really fun, and incredibly addicting too. I mean, I wouldn't say it's at a complete state right now, but even at this point, the progression was just so satisfying. Constantly managing your workers was really fun. It was always just so gratifying to keep rebalancing the distribution of your people to produce more of a specific resource, more of the resources needed for that resource, and so on. It was honestly just satisfying as hell to see your production of certain resources keep skyrocketing to new, much higher levels, and it made it feel really good to just keep playing more and more. Not to even mention Soulstones and Singularities. That entire section of the game became so interesting, because suddenly there's all this stratagy you need to think about, where now you are the main producer of all your resources and benefits rather than the distribution of your people, but all the different things you managed were simple and a lot of fun, with you constantly moving on to new stratagies and abilities with the charms mechanic. I mean, honestly, there were multiple moments in my playthrough where I would just check the clock and realise I had just been playing for fourty minutes to two hours straight, fully concentrated the entire time. To say it one last time, the gameplay is just so, so fun.

Going over the other various parts of the game, the story and tone of the game are really good. The diary entries you got and all of the various descriptions you got to see added a lot, and even though there were only a few, I liked the choices of trusting or not trusting and absolving or excecuting, it made things more interesting and I can appreciate that. The music is great. It's high quality, simple but effective, and has well made switches between different tracks, especially when going to the Darkness tab. The art is pretty good, and every creature or icon that is drawn has a lot added a lot to itself. The SFX is also well made, adding a sort of auditory visualization to every action you take, even if its technically just clicking a button, and the UI is simple but effective, using various basic effects to supplement the tone of various interactions.

Overall this is just a really great game. The good gameplay combined with the interesting story and good polish made this game just so compelling to play, and even as just a demo, it's already surpassed any other idle game I've played. I'll definitely be excited to see the full game release. Good job to TinyTakinTeller and the rest of the people working on the game, and good luck to them with the rest of development.

Edits: Just started reading the devlogs turns out its actually inspired by A Firelit Room man that threw me off lol. Turns out Kittens Game came out a year after the former in 2014. Unfortunate I've never played it before, it actually looks pretty good.