I remember starting this game at mid-day and having no idea that I would end up building paperclips well into the night.
What impressed me the most was how the "secret" gradually unfolded, so that you were already hooked and felt a compulsion to continue game play, even after it became clear that this wasn't the innocuous game you thought it was at first.
It led me to build a clicker game that also has more to it than meets the eye. (Shameless self-promotion starts here.)
Whereas Universal Paperclips explores the dangers of letting A.I. take over, my game (Unaware, https://unaware.pressbin.com) explores the moral status of people who exist in a simulation.
I played for 30 seconds before my screen got plastered by a long and heavy handed essay.
I prefer games not be so heavy handed but, If it must, I’d rather the message be part of the game (eg, papers please) than an essay on top of it. It just immediately turned me off, hard.
This was my impression as well. I don't feel the game explores the moral status of people who exist in a simulation at all. The game mechanics themselves don't have anything interesting to say, particularly given the false losing state of the people recognising that they're in a simulation.
It would've been much more interesting to play a game where the characters are aware. An interesting inspiration could be the characters in the old testament who are generally aware of the existence of a deity that can change their world as will, but continue about their lives and even occasionally willingly disobey the deity. And an even more interesting scenario to play through could be inspired by Eliezer Yudkowsky's "That Alien Message"[0], which I don't want to spoil.
Clicker Heroes is a shameless clicker-clone, but one of the better ones.
I think universal paperclips is definitely one of the best idle games, but I'd give Clicker Heroes (the original) a strong contender. I know Clicker Heroes 2 is out, but I haven't tried it yet myself.
Clicker Heroes goes for the shameless simplicity of growth, but its got the biggest numbers and the most "acceleration" out of any clicker game I've seen.
I've lurked the incremental game community for nearly a decade now. Some good ones to google if anyone is looking for more:
A Dark Room, Shark Game, Idling through Loops, Idle Skilling, Trimps, Idling to rule the gods, Derivative Clicker, Factory Idle.
A friend and I wrote "Dungeons of Derp" an (semi-unfinished) idle/incremental dungeoncrawler - "diablo 2 but with autonomous hero": https://idle-dungeon.firebaseapp.com/
I tried A Dark Room. Then i realized it was everything addicting about RPGs distilled down to some bars that you click to fill. It reminded me of my days being addicted to Diablo 2. They are straight up skinner boxes. Clicker games are the video game equivalent of crack. They're basically dopamine stimulation buttons. Keep clicking and you'll eventually be rewarded by that little burst of feel good juice when you reach the next level.
That's certainly one way to think about clicker games, and it probably applies to most clicker games I know of.
However, a GOOD clicker game (such as one with Universal Paperclips) recognizes that the genre is not about dopamine rushes. Instead, a good clicker game is really a management simulator.
Factorio is probably the best example: build your factory correctly, and you never have to lift a finger to do any work at all. Of course, Factorio is a management game, but at its core, its a clicker game (click to mine Iron / Copper / Stone).
Factorio becomes recognized as a good Management game because although the "clicker" mechanic exists to mine stuff, it isn't actually how the player is supposed to play. The "clicks" are there to give a sense of scale (it takes ~2 seconds for a beginning player to mine 1-iron).
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In a similar way, Universal Paperclips is a management game, and with an ending to boot. So you're "free" once you see the ending (unlike a lot of other games). Which is why I consider it to be one of the better clicker games.
Clicker Heroes also manages to make the jump into a solid management simulator. As you purchase heroes, the game is more about figuring out the optimal distribution of hero levels. Clicker Heroes does have an infinite grind however, so it loses points in my eyes.
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All in all, a clicker-game is simply a management game, like Sim City. There's just a "click" mechanic to connect the player with the absolute baseline activity of the game. In Universal Paperclips, you build a few paperclips one-at-a-time at the beginning of the game.
Honestly, the dumb skinner-box grind is far more present in mainstream games (MMORPGs, Loot Crates). Some clicker-games have this awful behavior, but the good ones tend to avoid it.
I've gotta admit, I've avoided anything with clicker in the description these days because of that experience. I've realized through personal experience, I get too into games with experience, status bars and things to manage.
I can't do RPGs any more since skyrim. I realized one day i'd played for several hours but had done nothing but craft things and organize my storage and inventory.
I get into dwarf fortress and CDDA every once in a while until i start to realize how much time i waste on them. I'll play fortresses until it takes ten minutes to do shit from fps death or spend several evenings in Cataclysm building a base and collecting food and resources and crap. I can't do it any more. It sucks me in too much.
I try to limit my gaming to platformers and arcade type games these days. I've spent way too long playing games about managing numbers, but i fail to do this effectively in life and i realize i end up spending way too much time sucked into imaginary worlds and not enough time focused on things i should.
I've wasted a lot of time on things like that. Years of my life cumulatively. Games like the diablo series and other action rpgs, the civilization games, a whole bunch of real time and turn based strategies, just about every jrpg on every console, a good majority of earlier computer rpgs and some recent ones, 4x strategy games, space sims and lots more. Thousands of hours thinking about and managing imaginary numbers. For me at least, the last thing i need is a bunch of numbers and bars with a button to fill them.
A few highly addictive browser-based MMO management games came out in the early/mid 2000s.
OGame, Travian and Inselkampf were three I spent some time in. On top of the simple clicking to maximise your holdings in-game, there was an additional layer of alliance/guild participation and meta game much like EVE Online. You tended to spend more time outside the actual game: discussing strategy, diplomacy and building tools.
'A Dark Room' is what we'd call an _incremental_ game, because it's not as much about clicking as most 'clicker' games tend to be - it's a game that unfolds, shifting mechanics and goals over time.
Most clicker games don't do much unfolding, and instead just become time management toys, trying to maximize rate of growth between extended periods of idleness. And - this is key - most clicker games aren't incremental games. Incremental games at least have some interesting draw: the game isn't what it at first appears to be. Clickers, on the other hand, are exactly what they appear to be.
Currently have 2582.2 hours played on the Android version according to its stats.
The game is amazing. There's an active subreddit as well where the dev is active.
Just as I think I'm getting to the next phase and finally to "late game" someone comes in and posts something insane like "I now am net positive on unobtainium from resetting even after buying everything and maxing chronospheres."
My jaw literally dropped as I'm finally hitting the infinite time crystal smash loop and even that took forever.
Clicker Heroes was my first exposure. It sounded ridiculous but people kept playing these games so I gave it a try.
Ended up deep enough to install AutoHotkey. Steam says over 500 hours played. Oops.
Universal Paperclips is great, and I like that I can "win" in a few hours. It wasn't really difficult, except once the drifters started killing me off. The balance of resources into my drone army was confusing and I needed the wiki for that.
What impressed me the most was how the "secret" gradually unfolded, so that you were already hooked and felt a compulsion to continue game play, even after it became clear that this wasn't the innocuous game you thought it was at first.
It led me to build a clicker game that also has more to it than meets the eye. (Shameless self-promotion starts here.) Whereas Universal Paperclips explores the dangers of letting A.I. take over, my game (Unaware, https://unaware.pressbin.com) explores the moral status of people who exist in a simulation.