Probably one of the best incremental game I had recently, intriguing plot, various builds, deep mechanics and most importantly, not a demo. Wish the author can cook more at this quality.
that final fight omg!! still have yet to beat it so i've obviously been playing the game wrong lol. i love the game and how the graphics change depending on ur eyes!!
Nice little game, story and all good, would be nice to see a sequel one day
Biggest issue I saw was that in your initial runs before your first ending, it was very easy to hit a brick wall, needing something you already lost access to and being unclear whether you needed to farm or reset and go back looking for.. you don't know what at the time
Passing the automated system as a human for example, not knowing what it gives you, and needing the thing it would give you in the next area It's kind of an issue in most exploration x prestige type games but it's just no less present here
Hey, thanks for the review! Fwiw, the game is designed such that the move you get from the system isn't necessarily required to beat that encounter — it does make it easier, but it can also be overcome with a couple more embers spent on perks :)
i must be doing something wrong if others can complete this game in one sitting i've been stuck trying to fight that soldier in the underground facility
but other than that this has become one of my favourite games ever its super interesting!
Ah, *that* dude! If you dont mind a bit of spoilers:
The "renew" move to clear debuffs and "suppression" skill (that you get from defeating A.X.S.U in combat) should help a lot in this fight! Also spacebar helps you quick pause :D
ohhhhhh ok alright yeah no won't lie i had never used the pause mechanic in the fights at all and that actually helped alot. I was able to get through thanks to you!
100 Percented it in a little over a day, very fun, but why does every ending with researcher friend make you just a pet or nice automatically? Is it to show that you chose to save the researcher instead of leaving them, meaning you're good?
More or less, yes! I'd like to think that the game kind of puts the player in the lens of our little guy, and the choices made in the game reflect the player's, and by extension, NOVA's intent :)
Salut, c'est normal que l'incubateur soit une partie super longue du je ? Je suis resté pas mal de temps dessus dans la même run, mais je n'ai pas avancé d'un pourcent... Sinon, super jeu !!
Hi! This part is meant to be a "puzzle" in the sense that you'd need to find the right skill in the cascade (reset screen) to progress! Try the "amoeboid movement" upgrade in "the protoform"! As long as you have "pseudopodia", you will get the speed boost!
Acuity definitely needs stacking crit abilities or something, imho. Perhaps, crits can also have a chance to doublecrit at 20% of crit chance. and doublecrits have a chance to triplecrit at 1% of crit chance.
P.S.S ACUITY is nigh useless; the numbers need tweaking. Even late-game, even with critical hits as a focus, you barely get a (on average, deviations notwithstanding) 1.1-1.2x damage multiplier while if you just put more of the points into the main scaling stat you'd get easily a ~1.3x (on average, some upgrades are better for combat rather than events than others) multiplier with practically a third or fourth of the cost.
It is not even good as a spill-over stat because spending those points on any other combat skill is more effective for sustain or AP management (not including DEXTERITY for non-DEX builds).
Fair take with acuity! It was initially meant to be a meta-stat: at one point, there were meant to be a few event-related puzzles that could also be skipped with high enough acuity, but that idea ended up falling through after i found it to not blend well mechanistically with the rest of the game considering the genre. Like you mentioned, it ended up being more of a companion stat, though I agree that its utility can definitely improved!
And here I thought I was so clever, avoiding evolving until after I had completed the side-quest...
Personally, I think it was a missed opportunity for some extremely interesting endings. If you wanted to maintain a dyad of endings, I would suggest the following: 6A is overshadowed by 6B, not shaking up the formula, and evokes similar feelings as 1A, and 5A is also similar, being far less interesting than 5B. Since the player is assumed to have already mastered the combat in late-game (since they presumably have gotten all #A routes), the feeling of discovering the alternate endings for each path could be expanded upon further with doing things in an unexpected order (as much as the linearity of the game allows) and would keep interest while the endings are ground out for completion. I got bored grinding every ending because there isn't much strategy (you can just use proto-form for every fight except the last, then evolve rapidly to get your desired ending with the help of AeLOT biomass, which is quite dull.)
Otherwise, the game was highly engaging and entertaining, and manages to conceal its inspirations just long enough to maintain intrigue while still knowing what audience it cultivates. Highly recommend.
P.S Just a minor critique, but I think the final eye upgrade is a bit unimaginative, simply rehashing the previous tier's exciting change - perhaps invert the colors in addition to shifting hues, or some other filter?
Lol, I get where you're coming from, sometimes I tend to be cautious too whenever i worried i'd be locked into decisions :p
Fair take with the endings! The "A" endings were meant to elicit a "distant" and "objective" feeling, something akin to "this is how the world is affected" though I do see how it can pull away from being something that's engaging/unique. The protoform cheese was definitely something that occurred to me and was why these costs were so high to begin with (used to be gated by the original "challenge mode" balancing); now I just consider it a feature, and that whoever pulls it off has earned the cheese lol
Yee the final eye upgrade could be a bit more interesting. The effects were all done with CSS, which I'm still learning to get better at, and i wanted something that was different enough but also not a migraine inducing nightmare (the red-stage filter was reportedly a problem for a small portion of players, hence the option to toggle it off). The hue shift is definitely a neat idea!
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 of working against the themes, the story expanded upon them?
For instance, finding 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; how Daniel would be able to luck his way into not getting instantly maimed by 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 I can write all this is that 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 to feedback), and as such 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.
10/10, especially for your first ever fully finished game! Incrementals normally get boring or slow after the first bit of gameplay, but the design elements and the story in BIOTOMATA made it fun the whole way through. Good combat system, whenever it started feeling repetitive something shook things up, good writing, good encounter design, well balanced, fun details everywhere, and in some areas challenge for 100%ers! (the stage 2 no daniel run took me the most tries, the final boss is good at dealing with the fortitude poison build)
Overall, loved the game a lot! If there was one thing I would change it would be making the encounters per area a pool with 3-4 enemies to pick from, and making the player unable to see where they were on the bar (aside from the final encounter per area) before a certain perception threshold. This would be to shake things up and make it so players don't necessarily know exactly what and when each encounter is going to be after going through once. Nothing has any problems now, but I think it would be interesting!
Great job on this, I hope you keep making games so I can keep playing them :D
Thank you! Happy to hear that BIOTOMATA kept you engaged all the way! Definitely fair that the stage 2 run was hard, since poison is one of the slightly more rng-dependent stats. 2-in-a-row experimental treatment corrosion does feel good tho hehe
Interesting suggestion with the enemy pools! I'd intended for BIOTOMATA to be fairly linear, and for players being able to decimate enemies after defeating them 2-3 times (save for the final area enemies), but it is interesting to think what the game would play like if I took a more roguelite approach :)
God. 100% completed the game in one sitting. Took around four hours and one shower in the middle of it. I love games like this and I rather obviously loved this game. However now that I’ve finished the full thing apart from the one “challenge mode” in the settings because that honestly wouldn’t be that hard (assimilation moment or ha ha neurotoxin go brrr). It would probably only take a couple of minutes. Could even get the good ending for those. Guess human would do fine too. Actually now that I think about it almost all of them would be rather easy to do… Apart from eldritch. Eh whatever getting off topic. Now that I’ve finished the full game I have but one thing to say… I NEED MORE. I CAN NEVER FIND GAMES LIKE THESE AND WHENEVER I DO THEY END TOO FAST. Man… Not that I’m asking you to make more to it or anything if you don’t want to. I’ll simply have to go find another game as good as this one… Hopefully it won’t take a full YEAR to find another one this time.
(Funny save file moment)
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Ayyy congrats on 100%-ing! "Challenge mode" was the game's original balancing, so you're right that it's definitely achievable with the right strategy and build! The game was made easier since playtesting reviewed some found it a little too hard (which is fair, since it is part incremental/idle!), and the challenge mode toggle was made because there were also those who enjoyed the original challenge :)
Also, completely relate to you on the I NEED MORE part lmao. I get so sad whenever i near the end of a really good game i played knowing it may be forever before i find another that makes me feel a similar way. It's so bittersweet to hear that BIOTOMATA made your list <3
35 days and I can’t say I’ve found a game that matches up with the kind of one I’m looking for. Tried White Knuckle and sure that’s been fun as hell (I already have 20ish hours on it after not even half a week of getting it and unlocked just about everything in it) but it’s not quite… the same. I need some kind of story. That’s also a pretty interesting story for that mode. Guess I can see why some would’ve thought so but personally I played through the challenge mode after making that comment and it wasn’t exactly that much harder. Though that might just be because of the fact that I had everything already… Anyway that’s all I had to say. Back to my search I suppose.
The game is amazing. The best incremental game I have ever played. Upgrading isnt tideous and annoying, resets feel rewarding, And once the game starts getting just a bit repetitive (not inherently bad) you start getting bits of story. Plus the fact that this game has choice based endings????? This is an absolute masterpiece. I also like how the focus isn't "big numbers bigger stats" and instead you have perks that make all stages viable to clear the game and get an ending. I adore how there are so many different gameplay aspects. If there was an expansion, sequal, or completely new game in this style I would love to play it! (I loved all endings where you save Daniel :3)
Aww tysm! I definitely tried to make it as engaging as possible while still maintaining the idle/incremental "vibe", and I'm happy you appreciate it!
I'm also still really happy that people seem to be enjoying the "good" endings. Low-key I wish more horror games have happy endings haha, I like a good spook but also a "hell yeah we did it" feeling at the end :p
Am I missing something? As soon as I get to the incubator, the game becomes so slow to progress that it's essentially a standstill. I've tried resetting a few times when I get to this point, assuming this is just the way to meta-progress, but it doesn't make any difference. I don't see any meta-progression choices that speed up exploration, and there aren't enough resources to scavenge to improve exploration rates. Seeing as no one else is talking about this, I have to assume I'm big dumb dumb and missed something obvious, please help.
Oh, I disregarded that because it sounded like it was referencing something I didn't have yet.
But now (given the context of your advice, thanks!) I'm realising I misunderstood and it's saying I have that thing equipped. I assumed I didn't as it hasn't made any reference to equipping things like that yet.
AHH yeah that's totally fair! Phrasing for the part-spefific upgrades was definitely a challenge for me; couldn't quite figure out how to word the description — "install" and "attached" feel just as weird, so I kinda settled on "equipped" for the time. Definitely open to suggestions tho!
Ooh, last section definitely requires a bit of build crafting, especially if you're doing the purple route (unless you max it out). Some hints would be:
- make sure you're completing tasks (bottom right blinky, those give bonus xp)
- the final skill for each stage in the ascension tree is very powerful, and you'll probably need to have one equipped (depending on which route you want to go) and synergize with it to beat the final boss
- final boss activates their skill at 75%; bursting is definitely an option!
Very fun game Sometimes it does take a while to understand where you need to go/how to do something, as I think I've been stuck on some parts (like the layer 5-6 with both options not really working and dying to 6-1), being kind of annoying and tedious. But anyhow it is still an enjoyable experience and a good take on the incremental genre.
Spoilers (and further review + save file) thank you for telling me to look at achievements as I would not have been able to do more than 3 endings. They are kinda easy to understand if you read the achievements, but figuring them out myself would have been painful. I would suggest making somethings more visible (like I still haven't found the setting to make it save the active states on the abilities) In general very well made.
Oh and The art is beautiful as well. Respect to the artist for that. And the vision changing with the vision level up is also a nice addition
save file (completed 100% achievements level 42, set 1 is for power (corrupted) set 2 is more for humans, set 3 is for the final being.
Fair enough, thanks for playing, and I'm happy that you enjoyed the art!
For autocasting, you can long hold the moves. If you want to save that between combats, the setting should be "Remember Autocast Moves". Hope this helps, and congrats on 100%-ing!
This game was so enjoyable, and I (luckily) realised that autocasting was a possibility early on, but that setting flew by me (I checked the settings once, and didn't find it, I just checked it again, and I'm kinda blind lol, its a good place to put it, just a bit hidden). It was fun to 100% a game for once,
Good luck on this/other projects =D. Hope to see more from you, as this is just fire.
Oh, may I know if you're zoomed in or using a screen with a lower resolution? I'm not able to control the follow and add to collection overlay, unfortunately! I would recommend either zooming out on the page using your browser (and then hitting refresh) or using the fullscreen mode provided by itch.
Is there a Discord server for the game (unofficial or official)? I have so many ideas for fanart of the player character + the enemies + even some ideas for little bits of music , cuz the UI & writing makes it so vivid
and I really do love the effect of the UI changing colours as we upgrade the body, I went, "oh shit" when i first saw it go all red upon upgrading to Corrupt and then read the archive updates. Probably whole bunch of stuff I could get into about this but I've only known about the game for 2 days now (weekend so I accidentally sunk 5 hours already, it had me by the throat )
Unfortunately not, haha. I've always intended for BIOTOMATA to be several hours/days of a fun, self-contained web experience, and I'm not particularly active on social media to begin with :p
That being said, the game *is* designed to let player imagination fill in the blanks, and it's really cool to hear that you have many ideas! If you do end up creating stuff, feel free to shoot me a link in the comments. It's always cool to read about how others interpret the plot and aftermaths :D
And ty!!! The UI was really fun to figure out how to implement when I was creating the game, I'm so happy that you appreciate it! Here's hoping you have a fun rest of the weekend with the game!
T'was the incomplete final stage. I blew straight past it to the end of the world. Then tried to bring the scientist along, but he got eaten. Thanks for making a nice little game.
The bad news: unfortunately you can't get your exact save back. Data is stored in localstorage and it's possible to be deleted especially on browser history clear or if there are privacy extensions :(
The somewhat good news: saves are in plaintext, and you should be able to edit them and get back some progress. In this case I'd recommend exporting the save, editing "playerBankedXp" to something high (maybe give yourself a couple more levels for the trouble? lol), and blaze through early game. For item drops, if you spec for drop rate, you should be able to reach 100% drop rate for most items. And for archives, I won't spoil too much, but there is a stage that gives you ridiculous amounts of int
Hard to say! As of the time I'm mostly focusing on irl stuff — still getting graduation papers sorted out, working on a portfolio etc. Basically finding some stable (and hopefully great) employment is the current priority, maybe pick up on some new skills, and after that, we'll see.
Rn, I do feel that the current game sits at a nice stopping point in terms of overall cohesion, and I do kind of want to leave it as-is plus a few QoL updates? There's definitely room to expand story-wise, and who knows? Maybe I'll be able to do something with it in the future? C:
Congrats, and I think you should keep working on this, you out of almost anyone I've seen on this site have the potential to make something incredible, and I don't just say things like that. It's all up to you though :)
It does, just very, veeeery slowly, mainly because 1cm³/sec is absolutely miniscule compared to 1m³. To be fair, you *could* theoretically wait 139 hours to travel 0.5m³ at this rate, buuut you might be better off resetting and getting the × STR × 1000 travel speed perk
If it helps, reset is designed to be not inconvenient in the game (and more as encouragement to try new builds), and there's a lot of QoL shortcuts that get unlocked as you progress, in the sense that you should be able to get back to where you were pre-reset in about 5 minutes max :)
Excellent game, and great design! I haven't seen many other incremental games that give earlier upgrade stages and skills endgame viability with the right masteries, rather than emphasizing "max upgrades, biggest numbers".
The Perception skill seems like the odd man out, though. I'm not sure if I was just missing an indicator, but it would be nice to see some sort of feedback when Acuity triggers a critical hit while in the combat window. Outside of the global critical chance, only one combat move has a direct relation to your Perception skill; I wish it had more practical applications to get around the feeling that we're just leveling the skill for story events.
Reached 100% completion after about 6 hours on-and-off, and held my attention the whole way through!
Thank you for playing, and I'm happy that you enjoyed the design!!
The perception stat is indeed a bit of an odd one out, so fair criticism! I initially intended for it to be used as a shortcut for a couple more "puzzle" events, buuuut the ideas didn't quite fit into the development timeline / game vibe overall haha. It ended up just settling as a utility stat for item drops/damage boost. Valid comment on the crit indicator as well!
Congrats on 100% the game, and it's nice to hear that it still held your attention through it all :D
what a beautiful, original, playful game. Reminds me of the good old armor games days where more people used to make cool microorganism themed games :)
Aww, thank you! Gosh your comment suddenly made me nostalgic for the flash games era... All the fun, creatively themed browser games that a kid could've asked for haha. Rip flash you're still very much missed dearly <3
Really struggled with multicellular-evil route with challenge mode, for some reason. Think there just aren't much good fortitude attack skills to use that can burst down the ending enemy.
All the other routes were doable even with challenge mode though. Very fun game, very enjoyable.
Thank you for playing!! Multicellular evil definitely needs a bit more luck (i.e. the 25% for 4 corrosion stacks) skill and focus on poison, which provide self-stacking poison bonuses. For future readers who missed the info section, space can also quick pause combat!
Congrats on beating most of the endings on challenge mode, and glad you enjoyed the game overall!
Ooo, another user did seem to share the same sentiment! Right now the "time in run" multiplier already has a diminishing returns formula, though I could potentially add a toggle that caps the "time in run" multiplier to ~2 hours?
Might be quite a while before I can get around to it, though! Currently still catching up with some irl commitments :p
With the way it's currently coded, it's agnostic to whether time is or isn't passing, and is instead based on run-start clock (to prevent tab throttling/simplify offline calculations).
I *could* do a check based on last save time as well, but I don't want to introduce more complexity to the code that could result in more bugs if needed, whereas coding a cap would be quite simple (and toggle-able, if anyone suddenly changes their mind and decides they want their offline time for the run). The game is generally balanced around having a 2x to 5x multiplier per reset atm. I could also make a configurable cap as well, now that I think about it...
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Probably one of the best incremental game I had recently, intriguing plot, various builds, deep mechanics and most importantly, not a demo. Wish the author can cook more at this quality.
came for the gameplay and stayed for the endings, only complaint is that I wish there were more
How do I not eat the researcher at the end?
Try stumbling across them in different stages! Each stage has an "ultimate" skill :)
How do I find the endings gallery?
Achievements button on the top right (star icon), bottom row C:
Thank you!!!
that final fight omg!! still have yet to beat it so i've obviously been playing the game wrong lol. i love the game and how the graphics change depending on ur eyes!!
Haha fwiw there's a few routes where the final encounter becomes a non-issue, try fiddling around with the "ultimate" perks for each stage!
Extremely solid incremental, fights felt fun to figure out, and the lore and world were very compelling! Absolutely a solid 9/10
Thank you for playing!!
Nice little game, story and all good, would be nice to see a sequel one day
Biggest issue I saw was that in your initial runs before your first ending, it was very easy to hit a brick wall, needing something you already lost access to and being unclear whether you needed to farm or reset and go back looking for.. you don't know what at the time
Passing the automated system as a human for example, not knowing what it gives you, and needing the thing it would give you in the next area
It's kind of an issue in most exploration x prestige type games but it's just no less present here
Hey, thanks for the review! Fwiw, the game is designed such that the move you get from the system isn't necessarily required to beat that encounter — it does make it easier, but it can also be overcome with a couple more embers spent on perks :)
i must be doing something wrong if others can complete this game in one sitting i've been stuck trying to fight that soldier in the underground facility
but other than that this has become one of my favourite games ever its super interesting!
Ah, *that* dude! If you dont mind a bit of spoilers:
The "renew" move to clear debuffs and "suppression" skill (that you get from defeating A.X.S.U in combat) should help a lot in this fight! Also spacebar helps you quick pause :D
ohhhhhh ok alright yeah no won't lie i had never used the pause mechanic in the fights at all and that actually helped alot. I was able to get through thanks to you!
Glad it worked for ya! Hope you enjoy the rest of the game :D
100 Percented it in a little over a day, very fun, but why does every ending with researcher friend make you just a pet or nice automatically? Is it to show that you chose to save the researcher instead of leaving them, meaning you're good?
More or less, yes! I'd like to think that the game kind of puts the player in the lens of our little guy, and the choices made in the game reflect the player's, and by extension, NOVA's intent :)
Salut, c'est normal que l'incubateur soit une partie super longue du je ? Je suis resté pas mal de temps dessus dans la même run, mais je n'ai pas avancé d'un pourcent... Sinon, super jeu !!
Hi! This part is meant to be a "puzzle" in the sense that you'd need to find the right skill in the cascade (reset screen) to progress! Try the "amoeboid movement" upgrade in "the protoform"! As long as you have "pseudopodia", you will get the speed boost!
Loved this game so much before I came back and played it again. Still super fun!
Aww, thanks for replaying! Happy to hear you still enjoyed it!
Acuity definitely needs stacking crit abilities or something, imho. Perhaps, crits can also have a chance to doublecrit at 20% of crit chance. and doublecrits have a chance to triplecrit at 1% of crit chance.
Big fan of this one, very well made. Excited to try out any future projects you might work on!
Thanks for playing and for your kind words! :D
P.S.S ACUITY is nigh useless; the numbers need tweaking. Even late-game, even with critical hits as a focus, you barely get a (on average, deviations notwithstanding) 1.1-1.2x damage multiplier while if you just put more of the points into the main scaling stat you'd get easily a ~1.3x (on average, some upgrades are better for combat rather than events than others) multiplier with practically a third or fourth of the cost.
It is not even good as a spill-over stat because spending those points on any other combat skill is more effective for sustain or AP management (not including DEXTERITY for non-DEX builds).
Fair take with acuity! It was initially meant to be a meta-stat: at one point, there were meant to be a few event-related puzzles that could also be skipped with high enough acuity, but that idea ended up falling through after i found it to not blend well mechanistically with the rest of the game considering the genre. Like you mentioned, it ended up being more of a companion stat, though I agree that its utility can definitely improved!
And here I thought I was so clever, avoiding evolving until after I had completed the side-quest...
Personally, I think it was a missed opportunity for some extremely interesting endings. If you wanted to maintain a dyad of endings, I would suggest the following: 6A is overshadowed by 6B, not shaking up the formula, and evokes similar feelings as 1A, and 5A is also similar, being far less interesting than 5B. Since the player is assumed to have already mastered the combat in late-game (since they presumably have gotten all #A routes), the feeling of discovering the alternate endings for each path could be expanded upon further with doing things in an unexpected order (as much as the linearity of the game allows) and would keep interest while the endings are ground out for completion. I got bored grinding every ending because there isn't much strategy (you can just use proto-form for every fight except the last, then evolve rapidly to get your desired ending with the help of AeLOT biomass, which is quite dull.)
Otherwise, the game was highly engaging and entertaining, and manages to conceal its inspirations just long enough to maintain intrigue while still knowing what audience it cultivates. Highly recommend.
P.S Just a minor critique, but I think the final eye upgrade is a bit unimaginative, simply rehashing the previous tier's exciting change - perhaps invert the colors in addition to shifting hues, or some other filter?
Lol, I get where you're coming from, sometimes I tend to be cautious too whenever i worried i'd be locked into decisions :p
Fair take with the endings! The "A" endings were meant to elicit a "distant" and "objective" feeling, something akin to "this is how the world is affected" though I do see how it can pull away from being something that's engaging/unique. The protoform cheese was definitely something that occurred to me and was why these costs were so high to begin with (used to be gated by the original "challenge mode" balancing); now I just consider it a feature, and that whoever pulls it off has earned the cheese lol
Yee the final eye upgrade could be a bit more interesting. The effects were all done with CSS, which I'm still learning to get better at, and i wanted something that was different enough but also not a migraine inducing nightmare (the red-stage filter was reportedly a problem for a small portion of players, hence the option to toggle it off). The hue shift is definitely a neat idea!
Thank you for playing!! :D
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 of working against the themes, the story expanded upon them?
For instance, finding 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; how Daniel would be able to luck his way into not getting instantly maimed by 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 I can write all this is that 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 to feedback), and as such 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.
10/10, especially for your first ever fully finished game! Incrementals normally get boring or slow after the first bit of gameplay, but the design elements and the story in BIOTOMATA made it fun the whole way through. Good combat system, whenever it started feeling repetitive something shook things up, good writing, good encounter design, well balanced, fun details everywhere, and in some areas challenge for 100%ers! (the stage 2 no daniel run took me the most tries, the final boss is good at dealing with the fortitude poison build)
Overall, loved the game a lot! If there was one thing I would change it would be making the encounters per area a pool with 3-4 enemies to pick from, and making the player unable to see where they were on the bar (aside from the final encounter per area) before a certain perception threshold. This would be to shake things up and make it so players don't necessarily know exactly what and when each encounter is going to be after going through once. Nothing has any problems now, but I think it would be interesting!
Great job on this, I hope you keep making games so I can keep playing them :D
Thank you! Happy to hear that BIOTOMATA kept you engaged all the way! Definitely fair that the stage 2 run was hard, since poison is one of the slightly more rng-dependent stats. 2-in-a-row experimental treatment corrosion does feel good tho hehe
Interesting suggestion with the enemy pools! I'd intended for BIOTOMATA to be fairly linear, and for players being able to decimate enemies after defeating them 2-3 times (save for the final area enemies), but it is interesting to think what the game would play like if I took a more roguelite approach :)
God. 100% completed the game in one sitting. Took around four hours and one shower in the middle of it. I love games like this and I rather obviously loved this game. However now that I’ve finished the full thing apart from the one “challenge mode” in the settings because that honestly wouldn’t be that hard (assimilation moment or ha ha neurotoxin go brrr). It would probably only take a couple of minutes. Could even get the good ending for those. Guess human would do fine too. Actually now that I think about it almost all of them would be rather easy to do… Apart from eldritch. Eh whatever getting off topic. Now that I’ve finished the full game I have but one thing to say… I NEED MORE. I CAN NEVER FIND GAMES LIKE THESE AND WHENEVER I DO THEY END TOO FAST. Man… Not that I’m asking you to make more to it or anything if you don’t want to. I’ll simply have to go find another game as good as this one… Hopefully it won’t take a full YEAR to find another one this time.
(Funny save file moment) 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Ayyy congrats on 100%-ing! "Challenge mode" was the game's original balancing, so you're right that it's definitely achievable with the right strategy and build! The game was made easier since playtesting reviewed some found it a little too hard (which is fair, since it is part incremental/idle!), and the challenge mode toggle was made because there were also those who enjoyed the original challenge :)
Also, completely relate to you on the I NEED MORE part lmao. I get so sad whenever i near the end of a really good game i played knowing it may be forever before i find another that makes me feel a similar way. It's so bittersweet to hear that BIOTOMATA made your list <3
35 days and I can’t say I’ve found a game that matches up with the kind of one I’m looking for. Tried White Knuckle and sure that’s been fun as hell (I already have 20ish hours on it after not even half a week of getting it and unlocked just about everything in it) but it’s not quite… the same. I need some kind of story. That’s also a pretty interesting story for that mode. Guess I can see why some would’ve thought so but personally I played through the challenge mode after making that comment and it wasn’t exactly that much harder. Though that might just be because of the fact that I had everything already… Anyway that’s all I had to say. Back to my search I suppose.
The game is amazing. The best incremental game I have ever played. Upgrading isnt tideous and annoying, resets feel rewarding, And once the game starts getting just a bit repetitive (not inherently bad) you start getting bits of story. Plus the fact that this game has choice based endings????? This is an absolute masterpiece.
I also like how the focus isn't "big numbers bigger stats" and instead you have perks that make all stages viable to clear the game and get an ending.
I adore how there are so many different gameplay aspects. If there was an expansion, sequal, or completely new game in this style I would love to play it!
(I loved all endings where you save Daniel :3)
Aww tysm! I definitely tried to make it as engaging as possible while still maintaining the idle/incremental "vibe", and I'm happy you appreciate it!
I'm also still really happy that people seem to be enjoying the "good" endings. Low-key I wish more horror games have happy endings haha, I like a good spook but also a "hell yeah we did it" feeling at the end :p
Am I missing something? As soon as I get to the incubator, the game becomes so slow to progress that it's essentially a standstill.
I've tried resetting a few times when I get to this point, assuming this is just the way to meta-progress, but it doesn't make any difference. I don't see any meta-progression choices that speed up exploration, and there aren't enough resources to scavenge to improve exploration rates.
Seeing as no one else is talking about this, I have to assume I'm big dumb dumb and missed something obvious, please help.
You may or may not have missed something, yes... :P
Spoilers:
In the cascade, scroll down to ascension > the protoform > amoeboid movement
You'll unlock a stat later that makes you no longer need this skill :)
Oh, I disregarded that because it sounded like it was referencing something I didn't have yet.
But now (given the context of your advice, thanks!) I'm realising I misunderstood and it's saying I have that thing equipped. I assumed I didn't as it hasn't made any reference to equipping things like that yet.
AHH yeah that's totally fair! Phrasing for the part-spefific upgrades was definitely a challenge for me; couldn't quite figure out how to word the description — "install" and "attached" feel just as weird, so I kinda settled on "equipped" for the time. Definitely open to suggestions tho!
Maybe something like "until you've evolved beyond the default [something something]"?
Not sure!
I'm currently stuck trying to complete the last section, not sure what I'm missing now lol
I guess I'm dumb or something haha
Really enjoying this game though :)
Ooh, last section definitely requires a bit of build crafting, especially if you're doing the purple route (unless you max it out). Some hints would be:
- make sure you're completing tasks (bottom right blinky, those give bonus xp)
- the final skill for each stage in the ascension tree is very powerful, and you'll probably need to have one equipped (depending on which route you want to go) and synergize with it to beat the final boss
- final boss activates their skill at 75%; bursting is definitely an option!
Very fun game
Sometimes it does take a while to understand where you need to go/how to do something, as I think I've been stuck on some parts (like the layer 5-6 with both options not really working and dying to 6-1), being kind of annoying and tedious.
But anyhow it is still an enjoyable experience and a good take on the incremental genre.
Spoilers (and further review + save file)
thank you for telling me to look at achievements as I would not have been able to do more than 3 endings. They are kinda easy to understand if you read the achievements, but figuring them out myself would have been painful.
I would suggest making somethings more visible (like I still haven't found the setting to make it save the active states on the abilities)
In general very well made.
Oh and The art is beautiful as well. Respect to the artist for that. And the vision changing with the vision level up is also a nice addition
save file (completed 100% achievements level 42, set 1 is for power (corrupted) set 2 is more for humans, set 3 is for the final being.
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Fair enough, thanks for playing, and I'm happy that you enjoyed the art!
For autocasting, you can long hold the moves. If you want to save that between combats, the setting should be "Remember Autocast Moves". Hope this helps, and congrats on 100%-ing!
This game was so enjoyable,
and I (luckily) realised that autocasting was a possibility early on, but that setting flew by me (I checked the settings once, and didn't find it, I just checked it again, and I'm kinda blind lol, its a good place to put it, just a bit hidden).
It was fun to 100% a game for once,
Good luck on this/other projects =D. Hope to see more from you, as this is just fire.
really great! the only thing i would change is making the endings a bit longer but i still enjoyed it a lot.
Fair enough haha, thank you for playing and happy you enjoyed it!
completed everything didn't feel particularly great about the ending that starts with "He came back"
hehe, it's meant to be a bit sinister after all :p
i cant hard reset, it says that there is no app that oppens itch-cave
That's quite odd! You should be able to hard reset by clicking on the save icon > Hard Reset > Yes, Begin Anew
Could you send me a screenshot of the issue?
can you make it more web friendly because the follow and add to collection is blocking the x
Oh, may I know if you're zoomed in or using a screen with a lower resolution? I'm not able to control the follow and add to collection overlay, unfortunately! I would recommend either zooming out on the page using your browser (and then hitting refresh) or using the fullscreen mode provided by itch.
Hope this helps!
Is there a Discord server for the game (unofficial or official)? I have so many ideas for fanart of the player character + the enemies + even some ideas for little bits of music , cuz the UI & writing makes it so vivid
and I really do love the effect of the UI changing colours as we upgrade the body, I went, "oh shit" when i first saw it go all red upon upgrading to Corrupt and then read the archive updates. Probably whole bunch of stuff I could get into about this but I've only known about the game for 2 days now (weekend so I accidentally sunk 5 hours already, it had me by the throat )
Unfortunately not, haha. I've always intended for BIOTOMATA to be several hours/days of a fun, self-contained web experience, and I'm not particularly active on social media to begin with :p
That being said, the game *is* designed to let player imagination fill in the blanks, and it's really cool to hear that you have many ideas! If you do end up creating stuff, feel free to shoot me a link in the comments. It's always cool to read about how others interpret the plot and aftermaths :D
And ty!!! The UI was really fun to figure out how to implement when I was creating the game, I'm so happy that you appreciate it! Here's hoping you have a fun rest of the weekend with the game!
Help i don't knoow how to use items :(
Items are passive use; their boosts are applied automatically :)
12/12 Phew, had to scan the comments for a hint to get the last one.
Congrats!!! Which one was your last one? :0
T'was the incomplete final stage. I blew straight past it to the end of the world. Then tried to bring the scientist along, but he got eaten. Thanks for making a nice little game.
Ah, that makes sense! Yeah that one's definitely a little different from the other one haha. Thank you for playing!
My save disappeared and I was nearing an ending of the game. is there a way to get my progress back
The bad news: unfortunately you can't get your exact save back. Data is stored in localstorage and it's possible to be deleted especially on browser history clear or if there are privacy extensions :(
The somewhat good news: saves are in plaintext, and you should be able to edit them and get back some progress. In this case I'd recommend exporting the save, editing "playerBankedXp" to something high (maybe give yourself a couple more levels for the trouble? lol), and blaze through early game. For item drops, if you spec for drop rate, you should be able to reach 100% drop rate for most items. And for archives, I won't spoil too much, but there is a stage that gives you ridiculous amounts of int
Apologies for your data loss, I hope this helps!
Welp! Ive managed to finish all endings, and got all the achievements, this was an amazing little game, and the endings were all delightful
You're delightful haha, but seriously, congrats on 100%-ing the game and thank you for playing!! :DD
Are you planning on developing it more/adding more endings and the like, or is this the 'final product' so to say?
Hard to say! As of the time I'm mostly focusing on irl stuff — still getting graduation papers sorted out, working on a portfolio etc. Basically finding some stable (and hopefully great) employment is the current priority, maybe pick up on some new skills, and after that, we'll see.
Rn, I do feel that the current game sits at a nice stopping point in terms of overall cohesion, and I do kind of want to leave it as-is plus a few QoL updates? There's definitely room to expand story-wise, and who knows? Maybe I'll be able to do something with it in the future? C:
Congrats, and I think you should keep working on this, you out of almost anyone I've seen on this site have the potential to make something incredible, and I don't just say things like that. It's all up to you though :)
Does the "bar" at the incumbator intentionally not move until you reset?
600 cm³ / 2.1 m³ moment
It does, just very, veeeery slowly, mainly because 1cm³/sec is absolutely miniscule compared to 1m³. To be fair, you *could* theoretically wait 139 hours to travel 0.5m³ at this rate, buuut you might be better off resetting and getting the × STR × 1000 travel speed perk
If it helps, reset is designed to be not inconvenient in the game (and more as encouragement to try new builds), and there's a lot of QoL shortcuts that get unlocked as you progress, in the sense that you should be able to get back to where you were pre-reset in about 5 minutes max :)
Excellent game, and great design! I haven't seen many other incremental games that give earlier upgrade stages and skills endgame viability with the right masteries, rather than emphasizing "max upgrades, biggest numbers".
The Perception skill seems like the odd man out, though. I'm not sure if I was just missing an indicator, but it would be nice to see some sort of feedback when Acuity triggers a critical hit while in the combat window. Outside of the global critical chance, only one combat move has a direct relation to your Perception skill; I wish it had more practical applications to get around the feeling that we're just leveling the skill for story events.
Reached 100% completion after about 6 hours on-and-off, and held my attention the whole way through!
Thank you for playing, and I'm happy that you enjoyed the design!!
The perception stat is indeed a bit of an odd one out, so fair criticism! I initially intended for it to be used as a shortcut for a couple more "puzzle" events, buuuut the ideas didn't quite fit into the development timeline / game vibe overall haha. It ended up just settling as a utility stat for item drops/damage boost. Valid comment on the crit indicator as well!
Congrats on 100% the game, and it's nice to hear that it still held your attention through it all :D
what a beautiful, original, playful game. Reminds me of the good old armor games days where more people used to make cool microorganism themed games :)
Aww, thank you! Gosh your comment suddenly made me nostalgic for the flash games era... All the fun, creatively themed browser games that a kid could've asked for haha. Rip flash you're still very much missed dearly <3
Really struggled with multicellular-evil route with challenge mode, for some reason. Think there just aren't much good fortitude attack skills to use that can burst down the ending enemy.
All the other routes were doable even with challenge mode though. Very fun game, very enjoyable.
Thank you for playing!! Multicellular evil definitely needs a bit more luck (i.e. the 25% for 4 corrosion stacks) skill and focus on poison, which provide self-stacking poison bonuses. For future readers who missed the info section, space can also quick pause combat!
Congrats on beating most of the endings on challenge mode, and glad you enjoyed the game overall!
hadnt thought of experimental treatment gambling to stack corrosion, thanks for the tip. was quite simple with that. Thanks!
No problem, glad it worked well for you!
saddest betrayal T_T
"but first, a snack"
no secret ending :(
No secret ending 4 u, you evil, evil creature....
i just wanted friendly eldritch horror friendo T_T
Finished all endings over a few hours only to realize there was the ability to save auto casts between fights.... I could've been so much lazier......
Thank you for your hardworking sacrifice, lol :v
Please add a toggle to turn off offline progress. It just feels like cheating in this sort of game.
Ooo, another user did seem to share the same sentiment! Right now the "time in run" multiplier already has a diminishing returns formula, though I could potentially add a toggle that caps the "time in run" multiplier to ~2 hours?
Might be quite a while before I can get around to it, though! Currently still catching up with some irl commitments :p
Why not just make it not accumulate time when the game isn't running?
With the way it's currently coded, it's agnostic to whether time is or isn't passing, and is instead based on run-start clock (to prevent tab throttling/simplify offline calculations).
I *could* do a check based on last save time as well, but I don't want to introduce more complexity to the code that could result in more bugs if needed, whereas coding a cap would be quite simple (and toggle-able, if anyone suddenly changes their mind and decides they want their offline time for the run). The game is generally balanced around having a 2x to 5x multiplier per reset atm. I could also make a configurable cap as well, now that I think about it...
Took several days, but I finished all the endings. Nice game.
Thank you for playing! :D
do items actually do anything? or am i using them correctly? Are they passive?
Yep, they are indeed passive boosts!
Ok just doesn't seem so. May be so tiny can't notice.
Yep, each item provides a small boost (~5%) so one individual item won't change much, but if you consider the 100 item cap, it adds up :)
100% the game with challenge mode on. IT was a lot more difficult than expected.
Congratulations! Haha yep, it is called "challenge mode" after all, awesome job for beating it :D
can someone please help me? I cant get past the amoeba at the start. is there something I missed?
You can use multiple moves at once! Also, the "correct" moves should be the basic attack and feeble hit, since they bothbscale with PWR