I think it’s far more in-depth and interesting than Cookie Clicker or Trimps, because there is so much content and so many different paths to follow. Definitely the most engaging and fleshed-out “incremental genre” game that I’ve played so far.
It’s made by Divine Games and hosted by Kongregate, so I believe there’s an entire dev team behind it. The only downside to that is that it has elements of pay-to-win with a real money shop (though you of course you never need that to advance significantly, and can certainly play for free, as I have been), and a devious little feature called scrying which gives you bonuses if you watch ads on the site.
Right now there’s a Halloween event going on until Friday which gives some pretty big bonuses, that can really help if you’re new (choose the Vampire pet, and collect as much blood as you can to level him to 25).
I’ve been playing it the past few months. The whole “different paths” might have been there two years ago, but now you don’t have much choice but to choose the most efficient path at each point in the content you’re on, simply because the entire point of the game becomes getting to the next reincarnation and seeing what new features unlock at what points. I’ve been purposely avoiding any spoilers for what sorts of things there will be other than the vague descriptions in the patch notes. The only thing I’ve searched for is why there’s a trophy for getting a very specific amount (some 4 digit number I think?) of mana, and there doesn’t appear to be a reason at all. I had thought it was a pop culture reference of something, but no, searching for it only returns people asking what the best way to achieve that amount of mana is. I’ve not been particularly happy with a lot of the design choices; there’s nothing even remotely balanced about anything, and perhaps that’s even part of the game, discovering when various things become unbalanced as new things open up, but it means that when you’re paying attention to those things the reincarnations can go by really really fast compared to others. They feel like they should sorta be like levels in an RPG, but the fact that some of them are so much easier than others doesn’t sit right with me.
I’m ready to make R60, but the next challenge is to cast 5 tier 5 spells, so I’m spending the end of this reincarnation on getting all the spells leveled up even though my guess is with the challenge bonus I just unlocked I could fly through another couple reincarnations fairly quickly. I meet the requirements for reincarnations so quickly, it’s been impossible for me to level up spells. Sure, at some point I’d need those spell tiers to progress and would have to wait to unlock them, but because the unlock time on spells is based on total spell time in the reincarnation and not amount of time spent since the last last tier was unlocked, it makes sense to just waste a month or whatever it takes on leveling everything up and have that previous spell uptime count towards the next tier unlock instead of resetting to zero by reincarnating.