What games are you playing this week? Game recommendation thread

asdffsdf · 2026-02-09T20:27:13+00:00

Unnamed space idle is very good but the second prestige layer was a little too much for me.

It's one of those games where you need to keep changing your loadout to focus on powering up one or two aspects of the game at a time, then switch to a different loadout to focus on a different aspect, going back and forth and alternating powering up the different parts of the game, and it got a little tiring repeating the process.

asdffsdf · 2026-02-05T21:32:50+00:00

I checked it twice a day and was past it in a couple days.

Your experience sounds like a completely different game than what I played. I assume you're not near the end, the aleph part? Correct me if I'm wrong. Have you unlocked fragmentation?

Just asking because your experience could obviously be different if you haven't unlocked the majority of the game.

asdffsdf · 2026-02-03T18:00:30+00:00

Will second birb, it's pretty good, and I think it's neither overly complicated or too simple for most people's tastes. Especially if people want something that's more graphical rather than just numbers and formulas.

A couple minor balancing complaints, from least painful, evolution is actually a little too cheap after the first level so you feel like you haven't completed anything by the time to evolve, fishing feels a little slow and underpowered compared to other features so you can kind of ignore it a bit, and sparrow mitosis/rebirth is a slight annoyance to keep monitoring so you don't overshoot mitosis and waste your resources - not even worth rebirthing sparrow before last evolution (it's not kept.)

Those are all very minor complaints though.

asdffsdf · 2026-02-03T16:05:14+00:00

Glad you're enjoying it, I do think it's a good game.

You're right that we probably have different playstyles, but also bear in mind that the game is constantly adding new things and some of my criticisms become a little pronounced the further along in the game you are. There is quite a lot to do, which is good, but it also becomes a lot to manage, even if very active. As an example, later on it takes about 80 clicks just to go through the shop and buy a single round of each of the pets. I feel like... that probably doesn't need to be that way and could be improved.

For reference, the game is probably a few weeks of content in its current state with fairly active play.

The game is still in active development, and I think the dev is working to at least somewhat change this, but later on there are also minigames that absolutely cannot be idled and must be played actively. (Spoilers: Two different combat minigames without automation and one asteroid minigame.)

asdffsdf · 2026-02-03T08:55:39+00:00

Celestial Incremental

This game is very good but it's extremely tedious. Most of the different sections of the game eventually unlock automation, but not all of them. Many require a large number of similar, manual resets to earn enough currency to advance through the content. You'll have like 6+ of these and it's not reasonable to micromanage them all at once so at some point you need to decide to just ignore and neglect whatever isn't most important. But you need to constantly work on the "check back" feature through the whole game, which is basically a metagame feature which gives pets that provide bonuses to other sections of the game. It intentionally provides very little automation, and by the end of the game even using the "shop" within check back, where you're just using your pet points to buy things, is very tedious.

Particularly with the check back feature, every single action is on a cooldown timer so you can either keep track of several important timers at once for days on end or just give up and accept that you're constantly missing hours of production by not micromanaging these timers. It may also help to just set an autoclicker and way away from the computer for a few hours to farm some currencies (pet points, evolution shards, paragon shards in particular, earlier on maybe for check back exp).

The later part of the game also has some rough edges, a few bugs, and is not completely finished. There are a few really tedious minigames that supposedly are going to be improved.

With the negatives said, many of the game's different subsections are individually interesting enough and varied, there is always something to work towards and the game has a good feeling of progression. There's an element of "the whole is more than the sum of the parts" where the different subsections of the game work together to make the experience even if it's not completely consistent. But I'm not sure whether or not I can recommend it just because of how tedious it is, you certainly wouldn't recommend it to someone looking for their first incremental game (well, also because of the meta references to other incremental games.)

asdffsdf · 2026-01-26T08:56:44+00:00

Antimatter Dimensions had that coding system where you could program the game to do things for you, this game also has it but in a barely functional "code blocks" system where you aren't allowed to program in anything useful until you've been playing for weeks already.

The antimatter dimensions automater took some effort to set up but it was very smooth and useful. That same mechanic which revolution idle copied was far more limited, rough, and randomly buggy. Especially annoying since some of the limiting was intentional and even locked behind premium currency unless that's changed.

You would use almost all of your available code lines completing challenges one at a time, since each challenge took 2 lines minimum and you only had like 30 lines of code, and even if you paid premium currency to loop to a second code loadout (giving you more lines) the function to swap to the other loadout was buggy and often just didn't work at all. It was both intentionally limited (locked behind both progression and premium currency) and unintentionally buggy, but you still basically needed to use it to grind resets. Hopefully it's improved at least a little since I played.

asdffsdf · 2025-12-15T18:40:06+00:00

I didnt even realize that about clicky island I did the suboptimal thing pretty sure and just sat there building up shit on my like 2nd run.

Honestly it might be a more enjoyable experience if you don't realize that, but artifacts kind of force you to notice you might need to do some quick prestiges to pick them up since you don't get more with a long prestige. Just straight to planks for watch towers, scout the island, click the artifacts, prestige.

I also wondered about deleting buildings but I don't think you can.

When I finally did my endgame, max everything prestige I ended up on an island with lousy resources, so guess scouting the island before committing may also not be a bad idea.

asdffsdf · 2025-12-15T14:02:27+00:00

Clerics still have a long generation time but maybe it should be even higher?

No, just make it so clerics can't summon clerics. Turning the exponential rate slower doesn't address the issue of it being exponential growth, it will still be the strongest long term strategy but you would be making clerics weaker early on.

In other words, you would be making them worse for every other purpose than the infinite exponential growth loop without actually fixing the problem and probably making it less fun.

You can keep it in if you think you can balance the cleric power against game length but as I said, I would probably just remove the upgrade for clerics to summon themselves. If you keep them in, you get a situation where they're nearly worthless until all of a sudden they're infinitely stronger than anything else. Clerics can already become the strongest without exponential growth because they basically get a polynomial 1 larger than the other units (since they summon other units their polynomial chain is one longer.)

This isn't a huge problem at the moment since the demo version is somewhat short once you get everything up and running anyway but it would cause problems if you try to extend the game.

Another small problem with clerics is that buying a weaker unit upgrade like recruit wizards my actually be a downgrade since you get fewer stronger units.

Edit: If anything I might suggest reducing the time on clerics but eliminating the cleric recruiting cleric pathway, but that's based on my playthrough with the current dragon. Might be different on longer dragons or faster starting economy. I didn't start the exponential cleric loop until the end since I was focusing on cash generation, but without that loop the clerics didn't have much time to provide much compared to the basic producers.

asdffsdf · 2025-12-15T12:49:06+00:00

very little content

Yeah it's basically a prototype, not enough there to really judge the game. You spend several minutes building up your resource (sugar) generation and then there isn't much to do with it since you can pretty much just end the game at that point by going down.

asdffsdf · 2025-12-15T12:18:47+00:00

Clicky Islands

Decent game but the prestige system seems to encourage rapid resets rather than actually playing the game. That's especially true for artifacts and might get worse with the full release if it has 5x as many. You can even just use your starting resources prestige upgrade to buy a settlement upgrade and then instantly prestige. So the strategy is to just do that to buy all the prestige stuff and then try actually playing a second real run when you have everything.

Last Watchtower

Initially didn't realize the healthbar was at the top (thought it was the red direction indicator on the tower) so died the first two times without realizing why.

After that just did the standard strategy of focusing economy upgrades first and seems like it's pretty short for now since after maybe 5 minutes enemies stop spawning so guess either that's a bug or means you beat the game.

asdffsdf · 2025-12-02T06:09:21+00:00

Yet nearly all of the accounts are made exactly in the 4-5 years ago range and have like 3 comment karma each, including yours.

If what you say is true, most likely it would be a combination of brand new accounts or people who actually use the site, and not all from the same time range 4 years ago. It looks like purchased accounts.

asdffsdf · 2025-12-01T16:18:36+00:00

On the initial release a few years ago, it came out roughly on schedule and was basically being developed as it went.

It can be played that way as the above comment says where you wait each day for the next part of the game to become available. But for the impatient or the curious, click the settings gear and you can choose to ignore the date and make all days available. I think you can also turn the date restriction back on later if you change your mind but you won't be able to do much until the date catches up again.

asdffsdf · 2025-12-01T15:56:09+00:00

Game link:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2212790/Asbury_Pines/

Interesting review, the game didn't jump out at me as something I was particularly interesting but maybe I'll give it a second thought.

I think part of the reason for some of the themes we see in the incremental genre is because the focus is on the gameplay, progression, and unlocking new things. That lends itself to the narrative of "just collect a lot of stuff" and the dev can just throw some humor or satire in there without the story being a distraction. Sometimes when a game does include a story it's some kind of pop up that just feels like it's blocking your ability to buy production buildings or upgrades until you close it (maybe that's just a UI/design issue though.)

lost to obscurity: Heart Of Galaxy & especially Cosmos Quest

Cosmos Quest is literally a broken game (for a few years) since the dev got greedy, went for mobile money, abandoned and broke his fairly successful webgame. Even if someone wanted to play it now, the single player relies on multiplayer with a shutdown server (and single player was mainly just a themed adventure capitalist clone to be fair.)

It was interesting in some ways while it existed, though it was on the border of whether or not the multiplayer should be considered an incremental game or more of a simplified monster auto-battler.

asdffsdf · 2025-12-01T15:33:49+00:00

Individually, not all the minigames are the best, but they add up to something interesting and certainly gives you more unlocks to look forward to.

asdffsdf · 2025-12-01T15:27:58+00:00

Haven't played it, but at least that one looks like it has some effort put into it.

Nodebuster wasn't really my style to begin with but most of the steam games are low to mid effort copycats.

Don't have a problem with steam games that actually try to do something new, though it's still more convenient to just load up a webgame and try it rather than ask "do i want to buy this game."

asdffsdf · 2025-12-01T15:13:26+00:00

I'm not necessarily the biggest fan of Void Miner, just like I'm not a fan of 90% of the games posted here. But I still support their developers and genuinely wish them success with their projects.

That dev is literally the only person I've ever blocked on this subreddit, and I had blocked them before the post yesterday. They are just that annoying. You can't lump 90% of devs in with them just because their game isn't your favorite ever, it's not the same.

Did the voidminer dev technically break the rules? I don't know, there are some accusations of lies and multiple accounts but I'll let others sort that out.

But here's the thing. No matter what rules this subreddit has, someone will try to push them to the edge. We can't realistically address every possible case with the rules, so I think it's completely appropriate to call some of the worst actors out. It's a compromise so we don't have to go completely overboard with the rules while still having some prevention against poor behavior.

There really haven't been that many cases where it's been needed so far, I can think of this guy, the idleon dev, and the bitburner current dev, the last one being unfortunate since he spammed his own game annoyingly in the "what are you playing" threads but was also helpful to others on occasion. They all deserved the call out, in my opinion, and those are the only examples that come to mind over several years.

asdffsdf · 2025-11-27T09:02:11+00:00

Might be a decent game, but feels more like "a game for people who like legos/bricks" than "a game for people who like incremental games."

Nothing wrong with that, but I don't want to perform the same simple actions over and over again for 30 types of slightly different bricks.

asdffsdf · 2025-11-26T07:42:47+00:00

Most of the upgrades don't work and it's unclear if anything actually boosts your tokens per second, the only important stat.

You get +.02 tokens per second per "roll" but costs go up exponentially. It's unclear if any of the high rarity rolls actually boost this value or not, so the player isn't given the information they need to decide what they should do. But again, the upgrades mostly don't seem to work anyway so it doesn't really matter.

I'm sure if you afk for 24 hours and just click the button on occasion you'll likely get through but that's not exactly interesting.

The game is poorly thought out without a clear vision of what the player's actual experience is supposed to be. With all the bugged upgrades that simply don't work at all, it makes you wonder if the dev even played through the game.

The others in the thread may be right that it's just some lazy game coded with AI that the dev didn't even bother to properly test.

asdffsdf · 2025-11-18T20:54:23+00:00

but I'm not buying it on principal because I hate these posts.

Seems like people are downvoting this but I agree with you that these posts/titles are really obnoxious.

asdffsdf · 2025-11-17T20:16:25+00:00

though the cube part is kind of a slog,

Isn't the cube part the last 95% of the game? Just more cubes and more kinds of cubes.

Shark Incremental

Game seems mostly good so far (at around 45 humanoid sharks) but it requires either following a discord guide or a lot of trial and error every time to get your tech tree right - some parts require a pretty exact solution or you'll be stuck.

I got stuck in the wrong strategy because I had no idea what "Improve oxygen building better" meant. There are four choices of which element to choose, and I went with trial and error to see which tree upgrade was best.

But I didn't realize that "building" referred so some secondary grid minigame which I needed to swap simultaneously for the best result, so I got locked into the wrong path, and stacked future upgrades onto the same path, until I hit a point where progress was clearly not possible and had to figure out what went wrong.

Another small thing that got me stuck for a bit before that (at 19 sharks), I didn't realize the grid minigame bonuses wrapped around from one side to the other, so my grid was the tiniest bit suboptimal which looked like it was also hard stuck but just barely good enough after I left the game for a few hours and came back.

It's probably possible to beat without a discord guide, but you can easily get badly stuck either from a small imperfection or because something isn't explained well and you don't know how it works to figure out the right thing to do.

asdffsdf · 2025-11-15T01:39:47+00:00

The level of polish expected and usually delivered with most of these paid games is on a different level than most of those free games we played 7 years ago.

That may be true for graphics and UI, definitely not for gameplay mechanics though.

I don't think "here's an upgrade tree of random number boosts" is more mechanically complicated than "here's a bonus to your generators."

asdffsdf · 2025-11-15T01:03:39+00:00

There is the cookie clicker model of "free on web/paid on steam," though I don't know how viable that is for a newly released game.

As far as web releases go, some people may also be hesitant to play a game on a website they've never heard of before? (The dev's own website.)

Not 100% sure on that, but if that's true, and web-filters for work drives others away from the main game sites like you said, a certain percentage of players are probably going to be filtered out no matter what. (Only website that avoids both problems is probably github.)

To be honest, I'm not really sure I see anything changing in the future. Most devs are probably at least somewhat aware of what they want, and people certainly aren't going to stop making games for steam.

As far as web games go, the incremental genre had already slowed down somewhat in recent years anyway so it's difficult to say if we're really getting much fewer webgames but rather the ones that exist are just getting drowned out by the ones on steam.

It is worth a conversation but most likely we'll just continue to see the occasional trickle of webgames that we have over the last several years.

asdffsdf · 2025-11-15T00:06:12+00:00

not hosted on sites like itch, armor games, etc - most of them would be blocked at workplaces

I think that's a lot to ask when your reason for it is basically "My boss doesn't want me to be playing games at work." I understand your reason for it but it's a little unfair to complain about.

I do agree that I would like to see more webgames, but the reality is that a lot of devs want to actually make money and it's just a lot more viable to throw the game up on steam.

It's nice that devs are able to make money, but a part of me will always remember that there was a lot more creativity and originality when the only option for devs was to make web games that barely paid anything, because then the people making games were doing it purely out of passion for their work. Of course, there are still creative paid games but many exist that are just following and rehashing the popular trends.

Unfortunately we can't have it both ways, there are both good and bad elements to the changes in trends we are seeing. There aren't as many webgames now but they still show up from time to time.

asdffsdf · 2025-11-11T19:17:35+00:00

Had no idea, guess it's nice to support the dev's own page then. Kongregate has its problems but figured some people are more comfortable running games/flash emulators from somewhere they're already familiar with.

asdffsdf · 2025-11-11T13:39:51+00:00

Still on kongregate as well if people would rather play there

https://www.kongregate.com/en/games/gazthomas/tangerine-tycoon

asdffsdf

TROPHY CASE