About Clicker Madness:
Among many idle games, one game that stands out is Cookie Clicker. The gameplay is straightforward and simple, you click cookies to buy upgrades and these upgrades will get you more cookies. This game’s basic concept, however, will not deter any curious person from enjoying this game for many hours. Cookie Clicker has a unique charm to it that keeps its players hooked, that, which is best explained by experiencing it for oneself. For the price of $4.99, Cookie Clicker has kept me entertained for well over 100 hours of active play, though, the rest I did leave it idling. Throughout all my current 247 hours, I have yet to experience a single bug, which just shows how well polished the game is, a feature that I do not see too common these days. Cookie Clicker has been one of the best purchases I made on Steam, and I recommend this game to any person that is looking for something fun, and or to burn some time. Cookie Clicker is a bizarre game and one that makes me wish that Steam had something better than a binary Yes/No review system, as this game can probably work well for some people but horribly for others. I have tried to keep this review as short as possible, but with enough depth to let you know whether this game could be for you. The idea that idle games can form some sort of critique of modern games (especially with RPG elements increasingly commonplace) is well-worn and incredibly applicable to Cookie Clicker, and whilst some idle games have started charging for in-game purchases, Cookie Clicker is admirably devoid of them. The real question for someone approaching this is whether what Cookie Clicker does is subversive enough to warrant putting time into it at all. The Good-ish I wouldn’t want to spoil what ends up happening in this game to anyone buying it and not really knowing what they are getting into, but the trailer on the Steam page and some of the screenshots already do that. This game’s story and lore scale in a bizarre way that in its absurdity is incredibly compelling. The progression of buildings at a glance does an effective job at hinting towards this; whilst you start off buying cursors to click the cookie, you soon employ Grandma’s to bake more cookies, farms to grow them, mines to them, banks to generate them from interest and much, much more including temples, wizards, alchemy and some fourth-wall breaking ironic inclusions. As the “tech tree” progresses, a news reel at the top of your window will start to report on the world of cookie clicker, and it is here than the real “lore” of the game comes out – it really is very well done; never are we given enough detail do build a coherent view of the world, but the specificity of the comments offer us unique yet contained viewpoints of the world. You could see this as looking upon a massive jigsaw through through many tiny and dispersed holes in a wall. As the Steam page shows, at a certain point this game will bring an apocalypse, cookie demons, and reincarnation. The absurdity is the game’s biggest strength. The Bad-ish Whilst there are reasons like the short paragraph above to come to this game – there are caveats and certain things to be warned of going into it. The numbers go up in an amazing and rewarding way, but it is ultimately pointless. That wouldn’t be an issue if it weren’t for the golden cookies; these are cookies than spawn on screen, and when clicked, offer a buff to cookie production or a lump sum of cookies. If you are actively clicking those golden cookies, you can get hours worth of progress done in a few minutes – but given how the numbers go up and to no real end, you eventually do need to ask yourself why you want to click the golden cookies at all. I do not think that the game is a waste of mental energy at all; I quite enjoyed doing some mental arithmetic to work out which building would yield the most cookies per second (CpS) – and anything that gets you doing mental maths instead of just staring at YouTube is surely good. The problem really is in the golden cookie chase – I found it pretty easy to ignore them and only click them when I happened to be tabbed onto the screen, but at a certain point you unlock a sound cue for them; this is the really ‘dangerous’ part of the game. The sound cue is optional and can be toggled off; the problem is whether or not you have the willpower to do it. For a while I left it on assuming golden cookies were rare enough and valuable enough to be worth tabbing to the program and clicking – but as you get your ascension perks and with the right deities in place (as said prior, this game really does go places…) the rate at which golden cookies appear gets overwhelming. If you have the self control to turn that sound cue off and not care about the golden cookies then this criticism will mean little to you; but there are definitely people for whom the sound cue will act as all too strong a distraction. That’s important to me, for the following reason… So…? Ultimately, I have said “Yes” that I recommend this game. When we can take an ironic distance from the game and enjoy it for what it is, namely; a subversive idle game that reveals an absurd world through its progression and news reel, it is wonderful. But when we lose the ironic detachment from it and start to care about the golden cookies and the numbers going up, the game ceases to work in that subversive and absurdist way. If you think you will care too much about the golden cookies and the numbers, I thoroughly recommend watching a breakdown video or reading some article going over the whole Cookie Clicker lore. If you won’t, then I think Cookie Clicker could be a good idle game for you.
