Idle Games have enthralled my brain - have you been making your numbers go up lately?

Games Video Games
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turns out that anyone can make a new Battle Network, except Capcom

Do share your thoughts, I never played the first one

Lately I’ve been “playing” Progress Knight Quest, in quotes because its far, far more passive than your usual idler. The original game had you pick which profession you would have active, one at a time, while this just runs them all simultaneously. The only real inputs you get are picking which type of rebirth you want, as well as which challenges you want to run (eventually as they open). Still, its very relaxing to let the numbers go. Unfortunately it has no offline progression.

https://indomit.github.io/progress_knight_2/

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So, Magic Research 2.

It’s kind of more of the same (complimentary), but with an eye to fixing some things that were annoying about the first one. That is, it’s still mostly an autobattler with prestiging (resetting to do better next time), plus a lot of systems around it.

Just like the first game, the greatest strength is that it’s not really about inflating numbers: Instead you get access to new upgrades and Quality of Life stuff by completing “storylines”, which are little story blurbs that you give you a little task to do or requirement to meet.

I’m greatly enjoying it as a second-screen fidget toy whilst hanging out on voice with friends. Just like the first one, it’s very flexible about how you engage with it–short bursts of very active play or slow background progress both work very well, and there’s (usually) something new to do or get.

It’s a recommend from me, if you’re interested. Though starting with the first game is probably better in my opinion. As I mentioned, the second game improves on some things, and it might be grating to go back afterwards; yet it’s still worth playing.

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Thanks for the review, I’ll keep an eye on both of these!

I’ve been digging back into old Prestige Tree mods, currently trying The Incrementreeverse. Its more manual than the average idle game, you get hardly any progress unless you’re doing a few clicks every few minutes, and its very, very repetitive but in a constant improving way; You’ll often get total resets with better resource output, but from my experience the game knows at which points you’ll want to avoid doing the same things again - like completing challenges or buying a dozen upgrades from the same tree - and automatize those.

Like every Prestige Tree game, however, it’ll be a little heavy on your browser.

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Not sure if you’ll gel with it but Melvor Idle is fucking rad. I’ve got over 2000 hours in it (generally open in another window/monitor while I do other work)

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Loving this one. I never really played the first but this one is very neat.

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Super late to the topic but I’m so fascinated by incremental games.

My favorites are Orb of Creation and The Gnorp Apologue. I really like how they feel “strategic” and have a lot of different choices and approaches you can take.

I also enjoyed Magic Research.

I just recently tried Cookie Clicker again and it really didn’t click with me, no pun intended. I’m not a fan of the ones that are purely number-go-up and feel like the progression is a linear path. I could see Cookie Clicker teasing me with that prestige skill tree but after ascending twice it just still didn’t grab me enough.

I’m curious if anyone has suggestions for ones that feel more strategic, expressive, or choice-based?

This is a genre where I’d love to try designing my own to see if I could make one that’s perfectly up my own alley lmao.

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For the past few weeks I’ve been fiddling around with Fundamental. I was told it was akin to Synergism, but lighter and - in a way - it really is. There’s no challenges, and far less paradigm shifts to be mindful off. You only have 4 stages, and at first glance it’s unclear how the prestige process will work. When I finally did the first redo, and came back with the Strange Quark, I thought it was going to be that, and just shelve it…there’s something about getting slightly better, have slightly more automation and redoing the stages again and again. Eventually there is a way to cut that short, but it takes a while, yet it still feels good to get that little improvement every time until I got there.

This is tricky because a lot of incremental/idle games work on a vertical improvement rather than horizontal. Having options to branch out tends to not be the point, but rather that you’ll need all of those on at the same time, and make your towards that goal. Loop Hero is one that comes to mind in giving you literal builds to have your character grow from, though its a fairly active game (but then again, if you’re looking for strategy, the idling will be minimal). Space Idle also has a fair amount of horizontal systems, though at the end it’ll be coming back to all of them being running optimally at once.

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I’ve been messing about with Squareixion. It’s pretty click-heavy, and I don’t know if I ~like~ it, but it’s compelling in its own weird way. The fact that it’s one big canvas you scroll around on rather than neat menues is equal parts enchanting and annoying.

And yeah, I occasionally go through a prestige tree mod. It’s kind of the fast food of incremental games? Most of them are really not that good, but there’s something fundamentally compelling about the concept.

Other mentions:

  • DEFRAG~98.COM cute aesthetically
  • CLEANSED it looks like a traditional roguelike at first glance, but it’s a resource gathering incremental. A pretty short game, I liked it!
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I’ll give those a try at some point!

One that escaped my mind, but now that I’ve been trying it again - or rather, a different implementation of it - reminded me that its in fact quite strategic: Idle Loops, or the current version I’m playing, Omsi Loops

Since all versions of Idle Loops are not great at explaining the premise and mechanics, let me attempt here: You have 250 Mana, and it runs out with every action you take. Some actions recharge that mana, some actions let you learn new info. At first you only have Wander, which costs 250 but eventually allows you to find Mana Pots.

Mana Pots costs 50 Mana, but give 100 in return, meaning that with each one you break, you’re getting a 50 Mana profit. That allows you to eventually chain more actions of Wander, and learn new other actions. Pick Locks will eventually net you 10 Gold each, and 1 Gold is worth 50 Mana at a shop; However you can also buy Glasses for 10 Gold, which make Wander work 4x better but! buying mana is a single action that spends all your gold at once, so you must do it after buying glasses, meaning you have to time how much Mana you’ll have leftover to chain these moves.

This is what my Action List looks like after a few hours of playing last night


Smashing 35 pots leave me with around 2070 Mana, 2 Short Quests cost around 1200 Mana to perform and earn me 20 Gold each, and 1 Pick Lock is around 400 Mana, giving me another 10 Gold. 1 Buy Mana action spends it all, pumping me up to 2900, enough to Pick Lock 6 times, buy Glasses once, then buy mana again, leaving me once more with around 2900. That’s enough to use Meet People once, and Wander 8 times, both increasing my exploration in two different areas, and my leftover mana at the end is 200.

With time, you’ll start toying with those actions, shuffling them around, seeing which order can be more efficient, not to mention you have stats that slowly get better with every loop (and the reason why I use “around” when calculating leftover mana, since I use less than the default values) and can also train those

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I finally tried that one out, and it’s got the strongest, uuuh, aquarium factor of the games I’ve played recently. I really like how tactile it feels. The shortest way I can describe it is “delightful nonsense”.

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Thank you for all the helpful suggestions!

Loop Hero is cool (especially aesthetically) but I feel like it’s too…hard? As in like, hard to keep the character alive, thus having to restart the run. I’ve played a few hours of it and had fun though.

I’m really intrigued by this Omsi Loops one, I’ll have to check it out. It’s such an interesting idea, and I agree that this is probably more “active” and “strategic.”

Thanks!

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yeah that game always read as like a roguelike to me than an idle game personally

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Loop Hero definitely has some measure of bullshit, it has been a while since I played but the RNG can be brutal. Some classes are definitely better than others, I recall the second one (Assassin? Thief?) getting me much farther than the default shield-knight type

As for Omsi Loops, make sure to go into the options “Borrow Time” and turn on the Bonus Seconds. The default is 5x faster, and you might want to crank it up to 10x after leaving BeginnerTown, and then crank it some more with every other different area

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I’m not sure if I’m the last person to discover this, but apparently there’s a web portal for hosting incremental games??? It’s called galaxy.click and it’s pretty cool!

(lol, Discourse is now informing me that saya already shared a link to galaxy.click in this thread back in March 4th. Good to know! And interesting that Discourse tells you that.)

I’ve been playing DodecaDragons for the past week, which I liked somewhat. I loved the aesthetic, and there were some interesting ideas (I just finally got to Magic Challenges and Magifolds, which I think are the most interesting ideas so far.)

But now that I know about galaxy.click I might swap to something else. I’m trying out Check Back now.

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Oh yea, on wednesday when I had to deal with some personal issues, I impulse bought Rusty’s Retirement and that’s quite an interesting little game. It has far less automation than I was expecting, but it does exactly what it promises: Sits on the bottom/edge of your screen while you do something else, so the expectations are less “watching something pretty” and more “absent minded mousing over while you’re on a call or waiting for a call”

I hadn’t picked up on galaxy click for some reason? It was 5 months ago, I guess. I’ll remind myself to check it out after I’m done/bored with Omsi Loops

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I LOVE RUSTY’S RETIREMENT

That was such a great game to put in front of me while I was grading student papers this year. Get one little plot going with all the drones and then just chill and plant a bunch of crops every once in a while. Excellent little break from essays.

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Had been a while since I popped a new title. I shopped around galaxy.click but didn’t actually find much of interest? I’ll make some more specific searches later, but the top titles were generally stuff that I already had heard of ages ago (still good, but not what I’m looking for)

I did try GooBoo just now, however. It seems like the type of incremental that keeps adding new layers to keep things fresh, which so far so good. I don’t know how each resource will interact with each other, or if they’re just there to space out your time, but I’ve just got to the village so it remains to be seen.

edit: Actually am not feeling that one lmao the fact that the mechanics are so independent from each other feels like busywork as opposed to a better synergistic feeling.

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I’m a hypocrite and I went back to galaxy.click, ended up trying another Prestige Tree mod. Its mostly similar, but you can’t miss with those, its The Game Dev Tree. Biggest change on this one is that prestiging resets the “branches” that are linked to the resource, and not their entire respective layer.

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This is from a while back, but I really liked Pachinkrememtal; I spent a day a few days back cleaning and taking breaks with it. I first beat the beta version and then I beat the full version lol

It reminds me of a similar game I can see on Steam but I actually got from I think an itch bundle for Android that I can’t find any more named Pincremental, where pinball is the physical resolution mechanic.

I need to try some of these other games!

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Another galaxy find, dodecaDragons. The upgrades and automation feels very satisfying, new layers added influence the previous nicely, and the permanent unlocks come in just as you might start feeling a little overwhelmed. Also the Win98 aesthetic is great.

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