Prestige Tree Thoughts

So with an increasing number of games that rely on several layers of “prestige”, or resetting the game to get rewards while automating earlier layers of the game in better examples of this style, the Prestige Tree decides to take this concept to its logical conclusion and makes the entire progression system around that. This is honestly a pretty good base for an incremental, as prestige systems ended up popular as a means to do “paradigm shifts” and try to make increasing your number more varied and fun. The problem with this is that you do have to make resetting a less painful prospect, because if you’re seven prestige layers deep having to go through and get everything again manually would be really annoying, which, for the most part, is a problem the Prestige Tree avoids.

I say mostly, because the early game really isn’t very fun for this reason. There’s a lot of clicking and jumping from node to node early on, just to get back to where you were before the prestige, which is when these kinds of mechanics are at their most annoying. Replaying the same content over and over is not fun, and while this phase is over quickly enough, I do think it gives the wrong impression of what the game is like and isn’t very fun to play. At the very least, I mostly dislike this in Row 3, I think Rows 1 and 2 are a functional introduction to the game and don’t drag nearly as badly. What I can say for Row 3 is while many of its mechanics don’t matter later on, the game gets a lot of mileage out of space buildings, and the gradual expansion of that mechanic is honestly one of my favorite parts of the game. It feels cool to see this old mechanic we get this early on evolve so much and I kinda wish another early mechanic or two would get the same level of focus and evolution.

Row 4, thankfully, automates the first 3 rows pretty fast. By the time you’re at 4 Hindrance Spirits, repeating the early stages is trivial and it becomes quite easy to get to the new content. The basis of the new content is two prestige layers that fuel each other’s production, quirk upgrades to push things along, and on the hindrance end, you can do challenges. If I’m being honest, while Quirks is fine, I don’t really like the Hindrance system much. In games that popularized challenges like Antimatter Dimensions and Idle Wizard, there’s usually components to completing the challenge beyond just “turn it on and wait”, and here you usually don’t even have to wait all that long. It basically becomes the equivalent of an upgrade you buy on a short timer, except sometimes you have to turn off an autobuyer or mash the E button to complete it, which feels more just like an annoyance than a strategy.

Luckily for Row 4, it later branches into Subspace and Hyper Boosters, and switching to primarily working with these mechanics gives it a nice bit of variety. Hyper Boosters aren’t exactly deep, it’s basically just the Super Boosters from Row 3, but again(which were basically just Boosters again in the first places, but now for Boosters), but it lets the layer have a bit of variety from not focusing on Hindrances. Subspace is a bit more interesting because there’s decisions to be made with Space Buildings prioritize-wise, and it has a lot more upgrades to work for. Then after that it connects back in to finish out Row 4 with a couple more Hindrances and Quirk Layers. I’d say despite my dislike of Hindrances, they’re at least unobtrusive enough that working through the interlocking upgrades is kinda fun, even if there’s not exactly all that much strategy or decision making to be had.

Row 5’s actual mechanics aren’t really much to write home about, if I’m being honest. Balance Energy is pretty much completely passive, offering a bunch of upgrades and passive boosts for getting more of it and leaving it at that. I don’t necessarily mind that, but it feels weird that this mechanic is juggling 3 different resources and at the end of the day the fact that there are 3 resources here basically doesn’t matter. Magic at least has some decision making as initially the cost of casting a spell actually matters but you get a reward for doing so, so there’s any worth in saving up spells, but the actual price of magic quickly becomes a non-issue. It briefly matters again as you can invest custom amounts into spells, but the amount that magic investment changes is on just a gentle enough curve that you don’t really need to be paying a relevant amount of magic on your spells at any time past the start.

For what it’s worth, there is a lot of “unlocking new stuff for old layers” on this one, which I tend to like. I don’t know, there’s something that gets my brain’s dopamine going to go back into an old layer and see how far we’ve come since the last upgrades. I actually think Hindrances are a particularly good mechanic to come back to for this, because having to come up with new strategies to clear them sounds fun… but well, Hindrances aren’t really designed much around strategy. So it ends up just being a couple more upgrades, but it’s not bad, anyway. I mostly just feel this row has very little about it that stands out, basically playing out as “this row is a resource and some upgrades for it” rather than feeling like it offers something unique.

Row 6 is probably my favorite row in the game, mostly because, like I mentioned, I think space buildings are probably the best mechanic in the game. Life Essence and Super Prestige don’t interest me as much by comparison but they’re perfectly fine “increase number” mechanics, while Hyperspace and Imperium Bricks are basically there to build off space buildings, introducing new ones while providing another layer of power to the existing ones on top of that. It’s not strategically deep, but there’s something viscerally satisfying about watching an old mechanic develop so much like this, which I think is a big part of the appeal of what the Prestige Tree is capable of. I will say putting Phantom Souls back on Layer 5 to make automating them a bit more complicated honestly felt more annoying than it did provide a worthwhile puzzle to solve, but it’s no big loss.

Row 7 revolves primarily around Mastery Bricks, and deciding how to invest them to get past the current hurdle. I’m actually fine with this mechanic and, given I did want more strategy out of the game, part of me regrets relying on a guide so much to get through this segment. I have heard in passing that this section is a bit of a guide following simulator and it’s very frustrating to actually figure out what to do though, so maybe I made the right choice. I only skimmed a couple messages as I don’t look at this chat very much, it’s hard to tell. Mechanical Challenges and Gears are basically just Hindrances again, with all the problems Hindrances entail; only now it’s a lot more experimental as you try to combine two challenges at once to get results. This, unfortunately, really doesn’t make the mechanic more interesting as there is literally no strategy to the mechanical challenges, they’re basically just “click the right buttons at the right time and instantly be done with it”. There isn’t even a wait like there was back with Hindrances, they pretty much complete immediately. Machines are also pretty much entirely passive, so this all pretty much just comes down to juggling Mastery Bricks the right way.

After going through all the layers though, I had a bit of a consistent problem with the game. I recognize this might come across as a bit of a hot take, because “timewalls” have become a frequently complained about subject in the incremental genre. I hate not having anything to do and just sitting for X hours until it’s done as much as the next guy, especially if it’s a several day long wait. But I think the Prestige Tree has the opposite problem, the game never really gives you a point where you can let it sit for a few hours, come back, and have made meaningful progress. Basically all progress has to be done manually, requiring the player to be active pretty much at all times to complete it, and at that point, the whole “you can leave and come back and have more stuff to do” appeal of the incremental subgenre is gone, which I think is a shame. That’s a lot of why the early entries in the genre like Cookie Clicker got off the ground, because it doesn’t require constant, direct engagement when the main reward is just “big number”. It’s especially notable because the Prestige Tree doesn’t really have much other incentive with its simplistic/bland decision making and  lack of much in the way of real flavor. Its satisfying enough to make big numbers go up in a lot of different ways, but those ways aren’t as meaningfully different or strategic as better games in the genre.

I think if I were to make a comparison on what I think a better designed take on this would be like, I’d compare Synergism. It’s another game with rapidly escalating numbers, interlinked mechanics, and heavy automation, but the game’s pacing is a fair bit stronger. You can leave Synergism alone for a few hours and come back to new stuff, but it’s not like if you check it frequently there isn’t something to do. You can get new researches pretty frequently even at the slowest stages of the game, and except around particular paradigm shifts if you set your automators right, you’ll always make some significant progress if you leave the game alone a while. By comparison, being active at all times makes it suddenly become a question of why you aren’t playing a more involved game, or doing something more productive with your time.

I negatively compare the game to Synergism, but for what it’s worth that’s because I think the mechanics here are  at least conceptually interesting and satisfying enough to give credit where its due. I mention space buildings a lot and that’s because it’s a mechanic that feels like it gradually expands with each new layer of prestige you get, the paradigms of how it works changing and providing a very genuine sense of progress. I feel games like Synergism and even Antimatter Dimension don’t really revisit their old mechanics like that as much, and I found myself enjoying the Prestige Tree the most when I could look back and see how far I’ve come and have a good reason to do so. I mostly just think the game needs to either focus more on building on earlier stuff in a way that actually matters, rather than just “+X% to Y effect”.

I did enjoy playing around with this game, for what it’s worth, because I think the core way progression works is novel and sometimes it really does feel like we see a real expansion on earlier content, rather than just new features that are “the same but slightly different”. It is nice to look back at previous layers and go “wow how far I’ve come”, and there’s a LOT of layers to check for that. I mostly just wish that it felt a bit less surface level, as there’s surprisingly little depth to how everything works despite the interlinking, and the pacing makes you kind of wonder why you’re not doing something else. Those are things to think about when designing future content, and creating new projects going forward.