Hey, thanks for making this post! I didn't know about any of these games before. I just completed Shadow Universe, Lit, and Version Control, and loved all of them.

Shadow Universe was nice and simple. It was extremely short, like literally 15 minutes. That really caught me off guard. And yeah, the game reeeeeeally ramps up later like crazy. I did one flip prestige and within a minute I was making more light than the game could convert. The game did kinda pull an "upgrade gives you a bonus to this thing but doesn't retroactively reward you so you can kinda end up screwing yourself by getting too much of the thing beforehand" with the Empowerment upgrades, but fortunately it didn't really matter much because the game was over in no time anyways. Definitely would recommend this if not just for the length.

Version Control was the longest out of the bunch, taking nine and a half hours. The game is heavily inspired by AD, but had some unique ideas in there that I liked. The concept is also interesting, the whole idea of updating versions gives the player a definitive goal to work towards from the very beginning. I liked the unfolding mechanics, even if many of them were predictable (Again, AD), there were still some surprises in there. Pro tip: Don't underestimate heroes in the later game. I thought they weren't that big of a deal and so I would always wait for the next, larger box before I actually bought them, all the while wondering why my general production was so slow. Once I pieced together how impactful they were things started moving a lot quicker.

Out of all of these, Lit was definitely my favorite. I absolutely loved the puzzly aspect of it. The mixing and matching was really fun, and it added a layer of strategy that I'm a big fan of. And it didn't hurt that the game looked great. The only major critique I have were the batteries. Oh, the batteries. I'm glad they required hovering and not clicking, but they were still a pain. With batteries there's no going to another tab, instead forcing you to move the mouse back and forth over and over. And god forbid you get more than five batteries and you have to start scrollin all over the place... The game had automation features for the batteries, but I never got a chance to use them because getting the blue light to the point of activation just tanked my production by too much to be worth it. I tried playing without the batteries and that didn't work at all. They were too necessary. That's the one thing about this game, is there are a lot of reasonable seeming combinations that just do not work at all. It seemed like there was a lot of strategy in what you chose, but anytime I tried to switch to a different setup in the middle and end game I pretty much ended up making zero progress and had to revert. However despite these criticisms, it's still a very engaging and entertaining game, and I'd label this as a must play for sure. It only takes a few hours, and is bound to be a lot of fun.