Your Chronicle is a pretty great idle/increment game that focuses on unlocking individual actions and storytelling, alongside a bunch of mechanics that become available over time and some good focus on managing resource production/consumption, party composition and planning. I ultimately couldn’t keep playing it after a certain point when I realized that it required a bit more active playing than what I was willing to put into it, which is a damned shame!
The core idea of the game is fairly neat. You have a few action types that you can make by clicking on them. Some instantaneously take a resource and convert it into another, others take time and can loop, producing and taking resources along the way. Others are upgrades that will unlock mechanics, other actions, or new options of things you can do using the mechanics you already. Finally, some actions advance the story in various ways and oftentimes have steep requirements. You do these actions to complete a few different stories that are presented in a graph (I love story graphs!) and get rewards if you get to the various endings of the game. I also loved that certain actions lock other actions, so you already know that you’ll be back here at some point, in a future story.
To help you progress, you get rituals that accumulate over time and give you points to spend in various “routines” that slowly fill up, giving you stat bonuses, and there are a lot of stats to improve. After a while you get a different ritual that resets your ritual progress and you have to start the routines all over again, with an increased speed multiplier and as you unlock more mechanics you get more and more points to improve this resetting ability. You get class training, a system where you can eat all the foods you find or make in the game to get permanent bonuses (sometimes the maths are too difficult to understand), so unlocking new mechanics impacts a bunch of different things.
There’s also monster fighting, where you’ll challenge dungeons and defeat enemies to find loot, recruit monsters - each with an impressive array of special and unique abilities that you can improve by finding monster duplicates - improve different stats, learn skills, the whole nine yards. It’s a bit overwhelming, but you’ll need to sometimes switch party members to get more resource capacity, get a specific element to deal with a tricky boss, it’s deeper than I’d first expected!
Ultimately, what made me stop playing is that I need an idle game to be a bit more idle than this. There are a lot of resources to juggle and most of the time just letting things run by themselves won’t get you any closer to unlocking new mechanics or progressing in the game. Let’s say I wanted to complete an action that required Anchovy Sandwiches. To make these, you need to do an action that gathers wheat, which takes time. Then you need to switch to making bread, because otherwise your character will be stuck at maximum wheat capacity, doing nothing. Then you need salt, and fish. Finally you can perform the action, but then it’ll ask you to bring two sandwiches, then three, up to ten. Making statues was similarly time consuming, as you needed flowers, turn them into wreaths, gather wood, make wooden statues, gather inspiration, turn the wooden statues into goddess statues, etc. etc.
Which is not to say that Your Chronicle is bad, it’s just a bit less idle than what I wanted it to be. It’s a darned shame, because it’s totally my jam otherwise!
