After three decades of gaming, this is the game I wish I could play again for the first time more than any other. Simple yet challenging souls-like combat wrapped in a cozy vibrant aesthetic that evoked feelings of wonder and nostalgia I was surprised I could even still experience from modern titles.

Do yourself a favor and go into this one blind. Knowledge is literal power in this world and the feeling of accomplishment from solving the multitude of puzzles seamlessly embedded in the environment is unfortunately a one-time experience that should not be missed.

I very much wanted to like this game as someone who generally enjoys automation sims, and frankly it's so close for me that I feel bad not recommending it. The core issue is that the building is just too tedious for a game primarily about building.

• Why do I need to build a long belt or pipe (something the game frequently requires) by manually placing dozens of smaller segments instead of just specifying the start and end points?
  
• Why is foundation required to align structures to the world grid?
  
• Why is the minimum nudge distance so large (even with ctrl held)?
  
• Why do I need to be so close to a building (and enter a menu) to change its recipe?
  
• Why can't I daisy chain electrical wires between buildings?

Blueprints help alleviate some of this tedium (especially with the new auto-connect feature in 1.1), but are also still quite limited. Why can't I create a blueprint out of something I've already built elsewhere? Why can't I nudge constructed buildings while designing a blueprint? etc...

I don't inherently have an issue with blueprint sizes being limited (constraints can be fun), but they are simply too small to be useful in too many cases. "Hmm, it looks like smelters should be built in sets of 16, and I just unlocked this handy blueprint feature - I should build a 4x4 smelter array blueprint! Oh nvm, the mk1 blueprint designer is only tall enough to fit 3 smelters vertically..."

Sure, the mk2 blueprint designer you unlock later can fit all those smelters, but I'd really rather not need to either mangle my design, use multiple blueprints, or rebuild all my smelter arrays later because of this weird restriction. I did persevere in that case, but the straw that finally caused me to walk away for good was when the game then pulled this same trick again in the next phase when I needed to refine oil.

You'd think the larger blueprint designer you unlock in the phase with oil might be ideal for setting up oil refineries, but no: these refinery buildings are suddenly much more massive than anything you've previously constructed, and so you can only fit 4 of them in a mk2 blueprint. The catch? All of the simple ratios for rubber and plastic are divisible by multiples of 5 refineries, not 4, and so blueprints felt frustratingly useless yet again.

Ultimately, this game is agonizingly close to being something I'd play endlessly, but sadly there's just too much friction in the core building mechanics at present to get me all the way there. The devs have clearly put in effort to remove significant friction elsewhere; being able to unlock and upgrade the dimensional depot to reduce inventory management singlehandedly inspired me to explore most of the map before reaching phase 3, for example. If similar features/upgrades were added to address some of the above gripes with the building mechanics, this would surely be one of my all-time favorites, but as it is I couldn't bring myself to finish it.