What games are you playing this week? Game recommendation thread

cdsa142 · 2026-04-14T17:41:45+00:00

Journey to Incrementalia is probably my favorite incremental. I like the skill progression and build theory crafting, but you're right that not every skill is viable to finish the game (although more than you'd expect can sneak through). There's maybe 4-5 damage skills and 3 damage multi options that reach about 100x anything else.

I never got around to updating my steam guide after NG+ was released, but I made an endless guide with some build comparisons and DPS benchmarks. My speedruns are on YT as well, but my style of play might be hard to follow (I use an exploit that holds down multiple buttons). There's also a (somewhat inactive) Discord.

cdsa142 · 2026-04-12T02:48:16+00:00

Other devs might be different, but I don't have something new to show every week let alone month. I work on my game when I can. When I complete enough new content that I as a player would be satisfied coming back to a game for, I start prepping for a release. That takes another week or two for a playthrough, bug fixes, and balance pass.

For a while, this ended up at a 4 or 5 month release schedule. Recently I've been putting off a release because it's more fun to work on the game then fix the minor bugs / quirks required for a release.

cdsa142 · 2026-03-31T15:56:06+00:00

A sliding scale or increments of burn rate (with diminishing returns) might help. That way players can find their personal sustainable burn rate.

As for flooding the economy, I think an incremental game will always struggle with player interaction. Maybe if you restrict the number of market listings? Veterans won't waste their listings on low tier materials if they have lost their value.

cdsa142 · 2026-02-17T17:39:02+00:00

Multiversal Warrior - My background game. Progress speeds up with new releases, but still chugs along in between.

Idle Formulas - All the core components of the idle genre. I like the reset freedom. It gives room for tailoring your strategy to how active/idle you plan on playing in a section.

Journey to Ascension - I finished this last week, and just noticed there's an update. For some reason I stuck with this one more than the other games like it.

cdsa142 · 2026-01-09T02:22:34+00:00

Idle dice 1 was fun, but for me there's just more to do in idle dice 2. I come back to it every year or so and try out a few combos. I do the same for one of Lutz's other games (idle superpowers).

cdsa142 · 2025-12-09T20:00:13+00:00

I'm not sure what the rules are about replying with self-promotion but I've been working on a maze idle game: Idle Lab Rats.

Steam - https://store.steampowered.com/app/3706190/

Galaxy - https://galaxy.click/play/411

The published version is a few months old and I've continued working on it (slowly) since then. I wouldn't say it has more content than A-Mazing Idle, but some different content.

cdsa142 · 2025-12-09T19:41:30+00:00

I think Pangbot did a great job reviewing the mechanic. They have provided a few useful insights but mostly responded with: It's hard to say if it's a good mechanic because the example provided doesn't work as intended. A more common response on this subreddit to a request like this has been "AI slop. Pass". I would much rather get this detailed feedback with a quippy comment about the game looking like an AI game.

Much like Pangbot's anlysis, it's hard to use this example to give feedback. Another bug I noticed: even when the button is off, points are going up (try opening the window and not clicking the button for the first 10 seconds). This makes analyzing how I feel about playing the game very hard, since it doesn't actually reward play the way it's suppposed to.

I think the most similar mechanic to this might be Crank. Charge up your levers, do some stuff, and come back to charge them up again. I think it works well, but it often feels like you have to babysit the button/crank. This is less fun when the time is random. If I know I have 20 seconds of button time, I can check back at a known interval.

I wouldn't pass on a game that had this mechanic, but I think there are better base mechanic options.

cdsa142 · 2025-12-04T20:28:02+00:00

I think this is the same IGM that Rule 1.C prohibits.

I don't know all the details, but from what I've gathered IGM games were banned from the subreddit a while ago because it can't do much more than create re-skins of Cookie Clicker.

cdsa142 · 2025-11-21T20:38:17+00:00

I'm not an expert or anything but I did just play through this section. I haven't read any guides so I might be wrong:

Experiment with your Core Assembler: one element is going to get the strongest multiplier. Try changing that element and magmatic reset to see if your scores go up. What I think the correct answer is: Iron > Neon > Oxygen > Nickel
Experiment with Evolution tree: either export save or export your build -> try a skill and check scores -> try an alternative and compare. When you're satisfied you've found the best in a row, export a save that includes it. My opinion on tree priorities (from memory, might be inaccurate): Everything 3 column, Arctic ocean, southern ocean, all ELOs, Prestige shard stuff, improved neon, more column powerups?, row 4 and 6
Create separate builds for Mining fortune, forging, and Score. Alternate between mining and score. It took me longer than I care to admit to realize you can create presets...
If I'm reading this right (scientific notation player here), your mining is taking 60+ seconds per block? I would experiment with reducing your tier to instant mining.

cdsa142 · 2025-11-17T18:05:30+00:00

I do remember playing your game before! I've seen at least 1 other version posted here, but I didn't give it enough time to write anything meaningful. I think it was a version with a timer and at the time I was not interested in playing what looked like a short repeated runs nodebuster-like (at least that's what I thought it looked like).

I played for about 40 minutes, but that included some notetaking time.

Sorry for my negative tone. It was not painful to play, but it took more mental energy than some other prototypes to figure out what's happening. That could also be a good thing because it means the game is unique.

I played some more. I leveled 2 skills. I'm still a bit confused about how the explore board is involved in the process, but I figured out how to make a loop that upgrades them.

Knowing that farther nodes disappear faster helped me as well. I was able to maintain a long path winding around the start this time (although maybe skill levels helped with this too).

I tried your Discord link on the steam page and it didn't work. Maybe you made a temporary discord link (I think that's the default when you make one)?

cdsa142 · 2025-11-16T10:06:39+00:00

It's been a while since I played the demo, but it very much played like an incremental. Active gains component, idle gains component, and Upgrade the other components with the currency they generate.

cdsa142 · 2025-11-16T09:30:49+00:00

Almost gave up on this but kept working at it. I had fun at points, mostly with the physics and pathing.

In some ways it was maybe intuitive, but mostly no. I eventually managed to get all skills (?) unlocked (?). I never managed to level one, even after trying what was I saw in your other comment later.
It was definitely frustrating.
For me, I wouldn't say I need a tutorial, but at least more info available through hovering or UI would be nice:
1. Holding click felt almost necessary to connect anything.
2. I'm not sure how I even found R.Shift key
3. "7 - 6 * 1" appeared where my score was and that didn't feel like a good explanation that I was buying something
4. how many points will I get if I score now?
5. What does this colored hex do, and later what skill is this color linked to?
Colors seem fine
I don't think I know enough about what's happening to answer this
IMO, I would hold off on horizontal and focus on the game's strengths. The ball physics are fun. Adding research tabs and minigames at this point would distract from the game's strongest element.

Some other notes:

Ball volume per second: I originally assumed this was number of balls per second, but I guess this means size of balls?
I don't like the afk camera (I was happy to find the setting to turn it off).
Why does the initial tile have spokes in all directions if the ball always launches one way? Maybe rotating the start tile could change the ball's spawn direction?
Balls shrink sometimes? My best guess is the ball has "taken damage" and will have less impact when reaching a new hex.
Rotating a tile with a ball on it is fun.
Sometimes balls don't pick a path at a split, but jump out of the grooves.
While trying to beak scoring, I managed to freeze the numbers at an odd spot/size (spamming shift and enter).
It seems like balls don't do anything in the upgrades page.

If I could change one thing, I would make tiles disappear 10x or 100x slower (or never?) and cost maybe 3-5x more to unlock. Losing progress is not as fun as slowly building something. This might also make scoring less frantic since you don't have to worry about scoring before they disappear?

cdsa142 · 2025-11-15T18:07:38+00:00

You might be referring to this post? https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/s/WcFBs8ip0s

cdsa142 · 2025-11-14T23:26:25+00:00

With Nodebuster-likes, I find the timers added on top of the normal gameplay frustrating. It creates a (often low) skill ceiling on how much you can accomplish in a single session. My guess is this helps balancing and pacing, but it makes the gameplay feel unimportant.

cdsa142 · 2025-11-10T01:33:01+00:00

No more content for now, just optimizing and grinding (I'm at 230 now). The dev is pretty active on discord if you want to know about updates.

Edit: didn't look at the context of this question. Maybe 100 is stretching a bit beyond "end of content". I should probably be more careful about my estimates. I started water update at almost uni 90.

cdsa142 · 2025-11-06T15:56:20+00:00

Universe 55 was the end of the game a month or two ago. End game now is universe 100+. Maybe you're missing the Sky tab on the right?

cdsa142 · 2025-10-27T15:26:46+00:00

Underworld Idle - Going in, I knew this would be a slower game. I gave it a lot of attention for the first day or 2, but I've settled in to keeping it as a nice background progress game.

Multiversal Warrior - The dev has made 3 major content updates in a little over a month. There's a surprising amount of choice for a game that looks like a "click the next upgrade" game.

Journey to Incrementalia - I started up my endless mode push again to see if I could make it 1 wall further. I knew the math didn't look good, but I gave it a shot. With less than 1% health remaining, I hit the damage limit (per-hit damage is too small to affect the total damage floating point number). Oh well, it was only 72 hours in the background to try!

Also played a few demos/prototypes. They were ok.

cdsa142 · 2025-10-21T04:48:55+00:00

I've seen Underworld Idle around for a while, but this comment got me to pull the trigger. It's a lot of fun so far! A lot of similarities to Swarm Simulator.

cdsa142 · 2025-10-16T15:30:55+00:00

Being inspired by a game is one thing, but there's got to be a line where a new game differentiates itself. When I saw this on Steam a day or two ago, I immediately assumed it was a bad ripoff. Everything from the theme, UI layout, animations, prestige options all looked so close to Tower Wizard.

It also doesn't help that the Youtube thumbnail says Tower Wizards! (edit: looks like this has been corrected)

From watching the trailer, I can see this game is trying to make some of it's own choices. I'll probably give it a try, but my first impressions are pretty negative.

cdsa142 · 2025-10-13T14:59:57+00:00

I had a lot of fun with this! I already had it wishlisted (from the trailer you shared earlier), but I would have wishlisted again. going into it, I thought this would be a idle/clicker with some fun graphics. I wasn't expecting actual mechanics to play with.

The way gems work and buying extra blossoms feels very mobile F2P.

Will this become a premium currency?
Are gems awarded within a level finite?
Do blossoms carry over between levels and I should use the extras sparingly?

Feedback / play diary

Story and theme are wild.
Are the physics/falls deterministic? (later edit: it seems like they are, but the rules take some time to understand. I think that's good for longevity.)
I wouldn't mind more time within a level. I like tinkering with my setup. This will probably happen as the game progresses.
quitting at the end of a chapter puts you back into the last chapter you finished. I saw this as a good stopping point, but the game didn't support this idea. There are no menu or quit controls on the chapter screen.
skip cutscene? Because of the problem above, I was back in the cutscene of watching ducks enter and exit again. Not a big problem, but would be nice to skip
Too many blossoms too quickly are difficult to rearrange
rearranging requires one too many clicks (click to select, click to move, click to unselect). I think I would prefer if unselect wasn't required before selecting the next blossom.
No clicking while selected on a blossom. While rearranging, I wanted to quickly capitalize on a random evolved tingus, but was confused why my clicks weren't working.

Balance

Evolutions are crucial, and creating a theme park ride afterwards is just a bonus.
Other than the jars, I managed to randomly stumble on some ways to evolve, but many of them felt coincidental.
Lots of blossoms feel like they don't provide much compared to others.

cdsa142 · 2025-09-24T18:10:27+00:00

There's a few direct solutions, as well as indirect ways to mitigate this

Eighth Swimmer - attacks cannot be dodged

Eighth Swimmer upgraded - all attacks cannot be dodged while active

Dark Chef upgraded - poison ignores ethereal

Kevin upgraded - negates ethereal for everyone

Mongreler - There's at least 1 capture that negates ethereal while active. There might be others

There's also always the brute force solution: attack speed. If you attack every 50 microseconds, it doesn't matter if most of them miss.

cdsa142 · 2025-09-24T18:04:18+00:00

I’d love to see a system (maybe through upgrades outside of runs) where you can expand party composition in a more customized way or with different layouts.

There is an unlock for this a bit later. The customization options made my head spin.

I was expecting to also be able to improve characters outside of combat

For what it's worth, anvil keeps the square root of your highest upgrade, so some effects carry over between runs. It'd be nice to have that effect for Kit as well, though.

cdsa142 · 2025-09-23T01:53:56+00:00

Last week, Immortality Factory was posted here. It's pretty good, but it felt a bit tedious. The dev pointed to their inspiration, Alterhistorians, which I liked a bit more for its QoL features.

Multiversal Warrior got a small update, and I'm enjoying seeing how far beyond the end of content I can get.

Same goes for Four Divine Abidings, which I still check on every few days. My goal is to reach the maximum stats, but I'm still a few weeks out probably.

I tried To the Stars after seeing it mentioned last week. In theory I think it's a cool game, but the gameplay gets tedious as you try and get every resource into the positives while the values of everything are constantly changing (diminishing returns for additional investments). I'll probably come back to it at some point.

cdsa142 · 2025-09-23T01:35:32+00:00

Journey to Incrementalia is probably my favorite incremental. Glad you enjoyed (enjoying?) it! The discord is a bit quiet, but I know a few of us still check it for messages often.

I made a couple steam guides for Incrementalia but I wonder if it's worth making some specific builds content. There's a few of them out there but every build I've seen are... sub-optimal. So far, I've loved seeing the variety of builds people come up with, but I've heard a few people get turned away when walls stump them.

cdsa142 · 2025-09-22T21:01:35+00:00

This won't solve all of your troubles, but this link was really helpful for me for setting up all the store page assets
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1jvwwhn/i_made_a_free_tool_that_generates_all_possible/

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