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You can mine a magical resource that you can turn into runes usable in magical spells. You chop wood to provide materials to make bows, arrows, and other weapons. You mine resources that can be smelted and smithed into the armour and armours typical of medieval-fantasy RPGs. The first was the interconnectedness of the various skills you level. That’s all pretty standard, but once I got passed the initial enamour with working out all the mechanics, I found there was a lot more buried beneath the surface the began really scratching the itch I have for these games. Rather than focusing on a single currency to gain, you attempt to level up various skills to their maximum levels, unlocking new opportunities, and building your characters strength and wealth to buy more stuff, and fight bigger monsters. I initially began playing, once getting my head around the UI, expecting pretty much the same experience as I previously had. This lead me to stumbling across Melvor Idle, an RPG inspired idle game. This power curve/creep means I often bounce off of one game once I reach a level of dominance or annoyance that discourages further engagement.

After a significant period of grind, I suddenly found myself able to max out every shop (the mechanism used in that game) within a minute of playing with nothing else to unlock. Adventure Capitalist had a good power curve until you suddenly become untouchable. Other games don’t quite get this power creep right, and after achieving a critical mass of multipliers you are immediately unstoppable. In games like Cookie Clicker you can be playing for a significant period of time, months or years, before you reach the point where you are truly beyond the grind, and there is nothing you can’t purchase or achieve immediately due to the scale of your multiplier. This system is good and enjoyable, and makes each time you prestige initially feel like a new level, and a next phase of your idling adventure, but can spiral out if not balanced well.

This could be a multiplier to your score, or a secondary currency that can purchase rewards that have a similar score multiplier effect. You slowly but surely build up your ability to generate the points that are the goal (money, gold, cookies) and then at a certain point you ‘prestige’ (starting from scratch again) but with some sort of bonus based on how many points you generated in your play through. With the success of Cookie Clicker, the next wave of idle games borrowed the same mechanics and progression methods. Idle games manage to balance the need for the player to feel some accomplishment while offering a reward for further investment, and turn the simple action of clicking into an executive task of optimisation and management. There was something immediately engaging and satisfying about progressing through the unlocks and becoming ever more powerful, while always seeing what could make you substantially more powerful just around the corner. not long after the release of Cookie Clicker. I’ve been fiddling around with idle and incremental games for as long as people have been talking about them in wider circles, i.e.

But for me, I really like seeing numbers go up. They are activities where you actively do very little as the gameplay mechanic. Another part is that are very weird as far as games go.

A part of this is how their mechanics have trickled into mobile games that use the time-gating as a way to extract absurd amounts of money from their players. Idle games are often maligned, and commonly misunderstood, and frequently categorised as a deliberately pointless waste of time.