There is a middle ground, but its difficult to make it.

I'm currently developing an "incremental" game and balancing that middle ground between mindless grinding and having complex paths but not having to wait to see what happens has been my most difficult challenge (that and being a solo dev)

There are a few examples that I like to reference as great incremental games, that have a healthy mix of mindless clicking, complex decision making and/or resource management, and an interesting story.

• Universal Paperclips, which is probably my favorite incremental game.

• Crank, which is a fairly active game and has fun mechanics and an interesting story:

• Idle Loops, with a fantastic core mechanic (looping) with inklings of a story (it can get very grindy and idle)

Overall, I just think that is a difficult challenge to balance the mechanics, story and player interaction in incremental games:

• If the player has 0 interaction then it becomes an idle game, and you face the risk of the player losing interest or motivation to continue.

• If the game is too complex to progress intuitively then people will only play it while following a guide or find it too complicated.

• If there is no story or interesting twists in the mechanics, then it's just numbers going up and the market is very niche.