Idle games keep getting better, as our pandemic brains get worse
Long periods of time at home turn out to be great for a genre of game that's all about planning, clicking, and waiting
Games Features Software
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
I have a theory: We all have a hobby that makes us a closet Redditor, in spirit if not fact. It’s that one topic that each of us is so specifically, obsessively nerdy about that we’ll weather all the sorts of people and things that make a site like Reddit a general drag to spend any time on, in order to find a handful of people who match our personal level of weirdness about this one thing. Maybe it’s posting pictures of birds with human arms; maybe it’s expressing your hatred of Grandpa Joe from Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory; maybe it’s exchanging pictures of famous women’s feet. (This is Reddit we’re talking about, after all.)
For me, it’s idle games.
In the past, I’ve written about the phenomenon of the idle game—sometimes referred to as a clicker game, or “incremental” game, or a whole bunch of other terms that generally mean “the numbers go up.” I’ve tried to explain to other, more regular human beings why the dopamine-starved portions of my brain light up in response to a game where I spend a long time farming a percentage of a number in order to get a thing that makes more of that number grow. Unfortunately, though, I wrote my column “Confessions Of An Idle Gamer” all the way back in the spring of 2019, and two things have happened since then: Incremental games have gotten way, way more interesting, and I, personally, have gotten way more starved of any sort of good-feeling neurotransmitters kicking around in my brain, as the pandemic has Katamari’d its way merrily along.
Where once the clicking of a single cookie could keep any intrusive thoughts away for hours at a time, I now find myself running multiple games in serial, just to get through the day—with new acquisitions aided by Reddit’s charmingly named “Broken Mouse Convention,” the subreddit for people enjoying my particular affliction. I am, in case my tone didn’t convey it properly, not the biggest fan of Reddit as a whole. But if it can get me a new line on the latest innovation in baking brownies or casting spells or whatever other random theme has been slapped atop the Holy Numbers this week, through whatever the latest hot incremental game is, I’ll happily stomach the cost.
Because seeking out the latest idlers isn’t just about giving your free time and clicking fingers to Brownie Clicker or Weed Clicker or whatever’s big at the moment; there’s genuinely interesting work being done in this space, often by one- or two-person teams constantly iterating on each other’s work. Take the culture surrounding The Prestige Tree, initially released by Jacorb 90 in 2020. The game’s name is a riff on “prestige” mechanics common in incrementals, which allow players to reset a portion or all of their progress in exchange for a resource that makes their future runs considerably more powerful. (The psychological effect is to allow the player, on said second pass, to breeze through content that once served as a major stopping point; the neurochemical benefits of this sudden shift in fortunes are hopefully self-explanatory.)
Prestige Tree makes prestiging the whole point: Each tier of the “tree” is a new set of mechanics that can only be accessed by getting far enough on the previous one, then hitting the big, appealing “Reset” buttons and reaping the rewards. That initial hook is made even more appealing by the fact that the game came with a set end point—a rarity for a genre where the numbers frequently spiral up into increasingly absurd convolutions of scientific notation, until the developer gets bored of being hounded by dopamine addicts and just walks away from the whole thing. Unlike many of its ilk, you can actually finish The Prestige Tree.
At which point, you can move on to one of dozens of mods that have emerged in the year and a half since, aping the game’s look and structure. (Including a rewritten, and massively expanded, version from Jacorb 90 themselves.) There are variants of “The ____ Tree” that take as their subject matter topics that run the gamut from game development, to money, to the creation of deadly planet-killing viruses, to even the creation of mods for The Prestige Tree itself. The vast majority operate as a series of nested optimization problems: What allocation of which resources allows me to push my point production to the next tier of prestige? Some are better tuned, or more clever, than others. But they’re all in conversation with each other in a way that’s as vibrant and fascinating as any other indie gaming scene.
And that’s just one strange little tributary of this vast and ostensibly lazy river—there’s a whole other set of “idle” games (Increlution, Loop Odyssey, Idle Loops, etc.) that are currently iterating wildly on the idea of being trapped in a time loop, trying to eke the most out of a limited set of resources before being forced into a reset by the ticking clock. Or pseudo-RPGs like NGU Idle and Wizards And Minions Idle, which are actually mechanically quite a bit more robust than many big-budget role-playing titles, despite the fact that their minimalist combat resolves itself automatically.
That’s to say nothing of the really out there stuff—titles like musical wheat-harvesting simulator Peter Talisman: Lord Of The Harvest or my latest obsession, Bitburner, a cyberpunk story where you figure out how to automate resources by literally learning to code the commands in JavaScript. And I’ve probably already dated myself all over again here by failing to note whatever new idea is about to crawl out of some ambitious developer’s GitHub.
Incremental games are easy to dismiss: They tend to be ugly, a little amateurish, and, at least on the surface, lacking in interaction. (Although, take as a counterpoint Marple’s recent Orb Of Creation, a reminder that there’s no reason an idle game can’t look and sound completely gorgeous.) Those same factors also make them deeply accessible, though, for player and creator alike. All you really need to make one is a bit of coding experience, a decent grasp of math, and a jpeg of a cookie. All you need to play them is, well, I was going to say “an insatiable need to exert the tiniest possible control over your own life, and a schedule that accommodates sleep deprivation.” But let’s say “a fascination with systems and the way they can iterate,” instead. (Also: They’ll run on damn near anything.)
I play incremental games (too many incremental games; I didn’t even mention my months-plus love affair with Synergism) because, yes, they scratch an itch. But I also play them because I love seeing new ideas pop up. There’s nothing quite like the little laugh you get when you see how someone’s taken the bones of this supposedly most simple of genres and twisted them into something fascinating and new. The numbers just keep going up; the games are following a similar trend.
14 Comments
I play (“play”) a lot of idle games, just kind of bouncing from one to another on my phone, but I had to force myself to stop installing them because I tended to obsess over them. I could be reading, I keep reminding myself.That said, I won’t lie, I’ve got a browser version of Antimatter Dimensions running in another tab right now, but only so I can cheat using the Javascript console.
I got both Immortals Fenyx Rising and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in a bundle from the PS store for $38. I had only seen the Fenyx Rising game in pictures here and there, and had no idea it was such a clone of Breath of the Wild. That said, I enjoy the Immortals game more than Zelda, and the humor of the game is just goofy enough to work for me. I’ve played the hell out of this the last week and most likely will be done with it later today. I’ve made it to the final “enter here for final battle” prompt, so have been running around finishing vaults before I start that.Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will actually be the first Assassin’s Creed game I’ve played. Wild, right? Glad you think so. I’m not sure if this’ll really matter to following the story; I don’t care either way. I’ll probably start playing that later today or tomorrow.
Hey man. I don’t know if you’re being affected by all the drama here. But if you are, know that I (and a whole bunch of others, I am sure) love your work, and will read your writings wherever they are put.I even listen to Everything To Guppy AS A PAID SUBSCRIBER, that’s how dedicated I am.
I would recommend infinite staircase best idle game i have played since clicker heroes.
I occasionally get the clicker bug, but after a week I invariable look at how much time I’ve spent on the game and take a step back to acknowledge that the diminishing returns aren’t very satisfying and I could be playing games that offer me a lot more variety, and then it’s gone, and I’m free of clickers’ grasp for several months until I think, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. This game looks cool, and I remember really liking clickers!” I think Cookie Clicker is still fresh enough in my memory that I’ve got some time left before my next binge.I’ve taken the time to complete Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye over the past week. I’ve read that the, uh… dark sections have been pretty polarizing, and I’m on the side of, “Yeah, that could’ve been significantly less annoying.” I don’t think it completely ruined the experience or anything, but it was a damper on a DLC that I otherwise have no complaints about. I’m going to finish cranking through the achievements, which are a neat mixture of, “Hey, did you find this?” and actual challenges, very few of which I would’ve found without looking up a list.I also started and finished Pupperazzi over the course of a couple hours tonight. It’s a goofy sandbox to get lost in more than any sort of challenging, narrative-driven experience. I may save the rest of the achievements for a weekend where I want to forget about my job, or I may took a look at my game list tomorrow and think, “DOG!” I think I’ve been somewhat spoiled by PowerWash Simulator because my first thought on completing the game was, “I can’t wait for them to release more levels.”Essentially all that’s left is playing each level at different times of day, taking on more photo challenges, pleasing the various narrowly-focused enthusiasts by pandering to their interests on Dogstagram, and filling out the rest of my pupperdex by snapping every breed, article of clothing, and expression. Which is… kinda exactly what I was doing before I unexpectedly got credits. What can you say? Game knows what it wants to do.
After a few months I restarted Wrath of the Righteous again. The first restart was due to a bug late at the end of the third chapter and then I got to the Abyss section. However at that point I had just gotten numbed on what a trudge each fight in the game was and how much it was ultimately about luck. There was especially a bridge fight in the Midnight Fane that kind of broke me and the Abyss felt just kind of weird.The reason I give that background is that replaying Wrath, it feels like they’ve tuned so many of the fights down. There’s still a major luck component and I do think that a part of it is that I just know what to do in a lot of them, but even then a lot of it just is so much easier to what it was before on the same difficulty. What makes everything so crazy is that Owlcat had this very same issue in the Pathfinder game where the difficulty spikes were a major complaint, yet even in their sequel it felt like their primary concern was that someone on their boards would complain that this game was so easy that it was made for newbies.To complain on my rant, there is a really frustrating advice the game gives as well by pointing out you can just avoid the difficult fights until later and that many of them are optional. Which is true to a degree, except they make mandatory fights in the game so hard as well that if you don’t push through the optional fights to get that experience and gear, those story fights become even more difficult.
Returned to Monster Hunter World after a long absence, and finally got past Tigrex. This was another big speedbump, and unsurprisingly the next two monster fights after that aren’t quite as difficult. Came in at the tail end of an event so I missed out on some seasonal tickets, but still it’s fun to be back in the swing of things.I also picked up Nioh 2 on sale, and, okay, I was unprepared for the difficulty. Like, it is vaguely similar to the Dark Souls games, but the combat system has its own little intricacies that are going to take a while to learn and the initial curve is pretty steep. I like the aesthetic of it and the character maker is quite good but I’m gonna have to set aside some time if I want to really git gud at this one.
Ehh, why not just masturbate? It’s just about as productive and a million times more fun.
I’m currently taking the opposite approach and trying to get through the giant narrative games on my list this year. At the moment this means Red Dead Redemption 2, which is even bigger than I expected. Hoping to move straight into Horizon: Forbidden West when it comes out. After that it’ll be between Mass Effect: LE, the Witcher 3 (finally), Persona 5R, and Elden Ring. In terms of ambition, this may end up being the equivalent of a new year’s resolution to lose weight…
I plan to finish up Type:Rider this weekend. It’s a pretty basic 2D physics-based platformer set in worlds based on typefaces throughout history. There’s nothing really notable gameplay-wise, but aesthetically, it’s wonderfully inventive; I wouldn’t be surprised if the library level from Pyschonauts 2 had been inspired by it.On the docket for this weekend: starting up Needy Streamer Overload and Halo Infinite. Maybe Breath of the Wild as well, which has been in my backlog for nearly a year.
Breath of the Wild is truly a magical game. Flawless design, emphasis on exploration, gorgeous visuals… It’s the kind of game I wish I could wipe out of my brain so I could play it for the first time all over again
Im glad I found clicker heroes and mr.mine to play during this hard times being at home. They are the idle games I frequently play. Highly recommend them, if you enjoy idle games.
Gaming has always been the time passer activity for people to relive from boredom and get engaged. Pandemic was just promoting it to another level when personal connections are reduced. Gaming custom mobile app development services was on fire as people keeping looking for better during the pandemic
Online gaming is always been a recommended choice for passing time and to engaged. In order to boost the gaming experience there are managed cloud hosting services that boosts the hosting performance with minimal downtime.