Plenty of questionable UI and other design choices in this one. For one example, look at the "breeding form" for the player, which is a detailed character customization mechanic that does absolutely nothing in the game as it is. Lots of work went into that, and it doesn't do anything except sit there. Admittedly, that is more or less what character customization is about, but I'd rather have seen more variant images on random NPCs before customization of the PC that shows up in one place. It does show that the artist has ideas about how to add variants for their images, which is promising to see.
Really, the art is first rate, and there is something appealing about the hybridization mechanics--it's kinda like Slave Matrix in that way, where you get interested in seeing what the different combinations will look like. Of course, the genetics in PoP are (for appearance at least) necessarily far simpler. You couldn't reasonably combine the sort of procedural genetics present in the game with hand-drawn art of any reasonable quality without the artist being worked literally to death. But then that number for tit size disagrees completely with the art for the character, or something, and a lot of that appeal goes out the window. More variations on the art for characters would go a long way to improving the interest of the breeding aspect of the game--but artist time costs money, and there's the rest of the game they're trying to develop.
Not to say the rest of the game is going in a good direction. Why are we making characters move even slower across slime? It's already hard to move over and shows up all over the place. And the combat is slow enough.
Really, the portals theme has things going for it. It already shows its potential. But this game seriously needs a "squad" feature so that you don't have to manually re-form your team, re-select resources, and re-equip everyone every time you want to explore a world. It'd also help in that you could have a team for watery portal entrances, too-small portal entrances, portals where you need flying, portals where your time will expire after three moves if you don't have swimming characters, etc. etc. There's nothing like forming a squad you want to use because you want to work on a character for a quest, only to find that the portals you have available you can't actually get into, or that one stabilized portal you've explored to death.
The actual gameplay of the game is extraordinarily burdensome, and there is really nothing that can be done in-game to lighten it--it seems to be an organic result of the way the portal worlds and character teams are set up. Based on some of the decisions made by the dev, it appears that at least some of this burden is intentional. I guess it's a way of making the game proceed at a certain, very deliberate pace: limited-time portal expeditions, with a punishment if you go over time; portals that don't kick you out when they run out of time, but instead silently prevent you from taking your NPCs and stuff with you when you are ready to leave--that sort of thing. Helping the player avoid bad choices is obviously not this dev's priority: you can sell or "library" a custom NPC, for instance. The character still does their other game functions, you just can't get them in your party again. Things like that, I guess, could be coming down the pike, but there's enough of that freedom to make bad choices in the game that the dev just doesn't seem interested in helping the player stay out of those situations. I'm trying to think of a succinct way of describing the game's design philosophy, and "uncompromising and strict" is the only way I can think to put it.
I understand we're still in the early stages with this one, and that balance and UI improvements and so on are not usually first on a dev's list of things to do. Frankly there's enough to like about this game to make playing it worthwhile, but unfortunately not many of those things are the actual gameplay. Frankly, I'd be happy if they just broke off the breeding part of the game and made a Slave Matrix knockoff, even without the touching/training part of that game.
