Bones and Coins Demo

Hi, I'm RPGJOD, and today I'm checking out the Bones and Coins demo. I wanted to see what it was all about because I generally enjoy idle games that have some kind of progression loop, and at the moment this is one of the top demos showing up on Steam. When you first start the game, it gives you a mouse cursor that you move around the screen to kill skeletons. The skeletons drop coins, and those coins are used to upgrade a progression tree. As you upgrade the tree, you unlock more skeletons, generate more coins, and eventually gain access to champions. The champions can be placed on the board, and they'll attack skeletons automatically to help generate coins faster. That's essentially the core gameplay loop. Kill skeletons, collect coins, upgrade the tree, unlock more ways to generate coins, and repeat. One thing that confused me at first was the champion system. It took me a little while to realise that you could actually place the champions onto the board. Initially, I thought all the extra damage was somehow coming from my cursor movement. Once I figured out how the champions worked, the progression made a lot more sense. As you continue upgrading the tree, you eventually move from bronze coins to silver coins. From there, the demo starts to reach its limit. You end up with a relatively small upgrade tree and access to two dungeons, and that's pretty much where the demo ends. There isn't a huge amount of content beyond that point. I can imagine where the full game is trying to go. It feels very much like a Cookie Clicker-style progression system where, over time, you rely less on your own input and more on automated systems. I assume you'll eventually unlock more champions, equip them with better gear, gain access to more abilities, and have them clearing content largely on their own. The demo doesn't really get far enough to show that though. You're still very much required to actively move the cursor around and participate. I will say that the progression loop is fun. The game sucked me in pretty quickly for the first half hour. A lot of that comes from the fact that the upgrade tree is initially hidden, so you're constantly wondering what's coming next and what the next unlock will be. At the same time, some of the progression raises questions for me. A large portion of the upgrade tree revolves around spawning more skeletons and increasing your ability to farm skeletons faster. That's fine early on, but it also feels strange because eventually you'll move on to other dungeons and presumably fight different enemies. If that's the case, a lot of the investment you're making into skeleton-specific progression starts to feel temporary or wasted. The crafting system also feels somewhat disconnected from the champion side of the game. It exists, but it doesn't really feel integrated into the rest of the progression in a meaningful way during the demo. On top of that, you unlock champions fairly quickly, but there aren't enough board slots available to actually use all of them. It lets you experiment with different characters, but the progression feels slightly mismatched. Overall, I had fun with it. Would I buy it? At this stage, probably not. I think the demo itself is worth playing. You'll likely get a good half hour of entertainment out of it, and I enjoyed my time with it. I'm also interested to see how the game develops in the future. But as it stands, if this launched with a price tag above $10, it wouldn't be enough to pull me in. My biggest issue is that it feels small in scope. The foundation is there, and the core loop is enjoyable, but there isn't enough depth or variety yet to make me want to invest money into it. That's ultimately what holds it back for me right now.