izigame.me

Loddlenaut is extremely charming and bug-free. It has fun visuals and great, crunchy sound effects, and it feels very rewarding to play. It's one of those games where you can go monkey mode and click to win which is definitely up my alley. The Loddles are extremely cute, but the game doesn't do much to explain how the Loddle evolution process or how reproduction works. I'm sure it's a very simple thing to figure out simply by feeding the Loddles, but they aren't interesting enough to be committed to when you consider the other part of the game:
I picked this up for $15 on sale in January 2024, and then after playing it to completion I refunded it. The game is marketed at $19.99 regular price. Twenty dollars for a game that can be beaten in or around two hours (the length until the Steam refund window) is not value.
I understand now that the Loddles are really there to be kind of like a pseudo-Tamagotchi: they are just an artificial time sink to occupy you past the refund window. Maybe that isn't how they were designed to be, but their functionality is very basic and to get all of the Steam achievements--particularly the one where you have to fill up every biome in Loddlenauts with Loddles--it is obvious that it is meant to take numerous hours to grow every Loddle and have them make plenty of Loddle babies which would no-doubt take time to do, and that component of gameplay just isn't interesting enough or rewarding enough to be worth the price tag of the game. The extent of making Loddle babies is literally just waiting for them to grow. You can feed them food yourself, but left to their own devices they will sustain themselves so long as they are in a clean biome. And that's it. That's how growing Loddles works: you just let the game idle. Player intervention is not needed. How is that even remotely a fun gameplay component? It isn't, which makes me believe this is only implemented to make you intentionally waste your time for a petty achievement. Maybe I'm pessimistic about this, but we are also talking about twenty dollars regular price.
I would purchase this again in a heartbeat if it was half of the price as to what they are asking. For emphasis on this, Subnautica is ten dollars more than this game and it has over ten times the amount of content. It's absolutely baffling to me that any publisher would think it is acceptable to slap a twenty dollar sticker on this. This is 100% where all of my problems lie, and while I implore anyone to play this cute little experiment, in this day and age 20 dollars can go a long way, and it should. And this game does not provide the value that they are asking from you.