Absolutely stellar game, played it all the way through with my brother and we enjoyed ourselves immensely. The mix between language puzzles and point and click puzzles is great and the translation of each new rune and working out what they all mean is a lot of fun. Genuinely a must play game for linguistics nerds

The main two complaints we had was that
1) Certain zones (notable the abbey and the bards) are VERY big, very complex and frankly very empty. Most screens have at least one thing to do, don't get me wrong, but you'll do that one thing your first time through without thinking and then that screen has no purpose besides being run through a great many times. Putting a few more people about playing music or chattering would definitely help these places feel less empty

2) It very much feels like the moment you finally get a grasp on things with the language and how the locations connect, you're booted to the next zone. This has the undersireable effect of causing you to feel like your progress and mastery is being constantly reset back to zero.

However the linguistics aspects are amazingly well done, each zone feels unique in how you learn and discover the language. If I had one complaint with it though, the only difficult language to learn is the Bards from level three, as they're the only language with a different linguistic style. Every other language is in the same style as english, and this one isn't. It becomes a bit of an odd duck when translating to it, and provides real challenge. But for some reason this was not repeated with any other language? Aside from the fact the Abbey people repeat a word to produce a plural, which is only one instance and not their entire language so I don't really count it.

Despite our issues, this is definitely a game where a lot of thought was put into every aspect of it. While I have complained a bit this is with the benefit of hindsight, and you don't really feel much of this while playing. This is an amazingly enjoyable puzzle game that I HIGHLY recommend everyone pick up!

Review of version 0.0.8

A friend of mine bought this for me, and I am so glad he did.

If it wasn't for the Early Access box on the storefront, you could easily convince me this was a completed product, and in fact that's what I believed for about ten hours of playtime until I checked to see how much the Supporter Pack was.

It's feature complete, bugless (a rarity nowadays even for AAA games), and will provide dozens of hours of entertainment if you're the type to love optimisation.

There's always another shape to create, another layer to stack, another idea to complete. And when you've done every milestone and task there is to do, then there's creating factory after factory of the shapes to skyrocket your Operator Level to see how far you can push it

The tasks are a great introduction to, and tutorial for, each new thing you encounter, promoting natural experimentation to organically teach you how the feature works. And while tasks will eventually run out, the randomised shapes used for increasing operator level do not, and will have you experimenting with the machines every refresh to increase the level higher and higher. I think I got to around 108 by the time I closed the game, and I will be returning to it.

With thankfully no resources needed to craft, and no power grid to maintain, you are able, and in fact encouraged, to go hog wild with expanding and optimising your factories and I adore that.

If I had to look for issues I would say the following are my main ones:
Keeping your upgrades balanced (which you are encouraged to do through tooltips that state how many machines will run on an optimised system) means that once you create a blueprint, you don't need to optimise it. You are encouraged to keep your upgrades balanced, and so the number of machines you'll need remains the same.

The blueprint system is a work of genius, and encourages modular factory design. However as you go through the game, you naturally optimise what you do, and you progress from retooling the modules, to just slapping down the perfectly optimised ones and plugging in the inputs. Soon you'll be slapping down entire factories with this and just retooling the starting parts where you input the pieces, and while that approach is efficient, it can overstay it's welcome without something to challenge it, sapping the fun.

There are many sizes of module, however the 1X1 and 2X1 are given first, and frankly they're all you need. The only reason to use anything else is personal preference, you're given no larger situations that can't be solved by just linking these smaller modules together. I think it'd be an interesting challenge to the player to be forced to use the researched pieces rather than rely on the 1x1 and 2x1 pieces you get at the start. But by the time most of us will unlock the larger pieces we've already learned to optimise machine layout within the smaller ones, eliminating the need to upgrade unless you get bored of linking the small modules together.

The last complaint is the one that I found myself getting annoyed with the most. Inside modules you can click on anything and press O to select every system within that factory. This is great for deleting entire factory setups at once, but once you move beyond the interiors of modules, you can no longer do that. And given much of the mid to late game is spent linking already optimised modules together, this can get annoying very quickly. I'd often leave factories up and just disconnect the output rather than deal with travelling all over the immediate area to fully delete that factory.

I'd love to have similar functionality given to the full factories, to allow easy deletion of obsolete sections.

But really all the negativity I can spew is minor compared to the praise. This is a game I will come back to again and again just to play in the mechanical sandbox it's created. To discover new ways of doing old tasks and see how the developers react and implement feedback.

This is a game genuinely worth both your time and money, and these developers our support.