It would be one thing if these pop-up nags were actually helpful or useful. In fact, if I kept following these instructions, I quickly lost.
Pro-tip from a Lethis survivor: You rarely need to POE currency trade build more houses. On the contrary, you need more people to move into existing ones; building additional housing will destroy any possibility of your tent city ever developing into an urban center, and you will therefore lose your campaign. In other words, what little in-game assistance Lethis does offer is lies. All of it, lies.
No player ever likes to feel cheated out of a hard-earned victory, and I am no different. Once I understood that Lethis's constant, unsolicited advice is untrustworthy, all my goodwill for the game went right out the window.
To my credit, I did eventually learn how to 'play' Lethis. By the time I'd 'solved' the game, though, I realized that Lethis is both deceptively simple and deliberately obtuse. At its worst, Lethis is willfully inscrutable: It withholds crucial information from the player, on purpose, presumably to conceal the game's mechanical shallowness. It manufactures mystique where there is none.
At the game's best—once the player stumbles onto enlightenment, finally penetrates these systems and rulesets—the game becomes an interminable grind. Lethis doesn't expect its player to strategize, only to learn the rules. The game loses its magic just as soon as it becomes playable.
The big secret Lethis tries to keep is, it's boring.
No ghost in the machine
I often found myself clicking, in panicked desperation, on every single individual building and structure, trying to understand where my perfect Jurassic Park had broken down. The culprit usually turns out to be something piddling—a small storefront isn't stocking fish, for whatever reason, or steam isn't making it all the way to POE currency a mine across the map, or the jeweler isn't receiving his shipments of gold, or, or, or...! (These problems always have the same single economic solution: Overproduce. Overproduce everything.)
