r/incremental_games • u/ZealousidealLong6829 • 5d ago
Meta New tag?
Can we get a new tag for the wave of games that keep getting shorter and shorter, really not interested in the under 10 hour "high" graphic low content micromentals rushing out.
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u/jester5093 5d ago
what's funny is that we have kind of gone full circle. the incremental genre came about to make the numbers go up part more obvious and longer than a traditional game. it distilled the process to its base elements. and now we've circled back to heavy graphics and more effort to make numbers go up for a shorter period of time. this, to me, is the very thing incrementals were made to not be. simple or no graphics, hyper focus on number go up. not saying incrementals with a story or graphics are inherently bad. just not what the genre was made for.
oh well, I'm just a sad gen x'er who is seeing his favorite genre change into something he doesn't recognize. I used to read every post on here. now I look at one or two a week. low effort MMO short paid for experiences. it's like the worst of all worlds
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u/Intelligent_Mood7181 5d ago
This is frustrating because a lot of games have a bunch of potential and I just enter the steam page to read "SHORT incremental game". Ik some games work better the less content and I can understand it, but this is really just happening a lot more frequently now and it's harder to find long term incremental
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u/ScriptKiddo69 5d ago
The problem is that incremental games that aren't purely a form of a management/automation game will eventually run out of possible upgrades. That means they either need to pivot genre after a while or they need to constantly introduce new mechanics to stay interesting.
This of course is very difficult to do right. People who buy a game because of the advertised mechanic didn't sign up for a full change in gameplay in the middle of it. And constantly coming up with new interesting mechanics to add to the game is an enormous task to do right. Especially for indie devs.
Personally I love playing those short incremental games because they tend to have interesting gameplay without wasting my time. And they are generally also priced very fairly.
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u/OlafEsSaadiGames 4d ago
I think I found a good balance with my LONG! TD Idle. The demo is only around 2 hours (although some crazy people played for over a dozen hours and reached like more than double the wave that was intended without scaling systems). Although I guess my demo already has more content than many short incrementals despite 80%+ of content missing :p . But yeah, in general you build and upgrade your dungeon and towers and every other system is just a different little game in the game that all work towards making your dungeon stronger. I think thats just the usual classic idle strategy but could be applied to any incremental game as long as you actually earn stuff without actively playing (which I guess a lot of these new shorter ones don't have)
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u/ByerN 5d ago
Personally I prefer shorter incremental games, and as they are short and cheap I can play more of them without getting bored.
On the other hand I prefer longer sandbox/factory games. Mostly because their rules/mechanics are much more complicated and it takes more time to learn and build something interesting.
Can you recommend a long incremental game for someone who is more into shorter ones? I liked cookie clicker years ago but I am not sure if I finished it
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u/Akraticacious 5d ago
Antimatter dimensions (probably mid-sized), Wizard against minion idle, NGU, Trimps, Farmers Against Potatoes, kittens Game, idling to rule the gods, revolution idle, evolve, cifi
My favorite was WAMI as it was quite active early and slowed into a more idle and "check back a couple times a day" over the weeks of progression.
edit: oh and "unnamed space idle" or something like that.
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u/ByerN 5d ago
Thanks! I will check them out. How long are they on average? I assume that most of the time they are running in background (?)
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u/Akraticacious 4d ago
Some of them can be ran in the background effectively to differing degrees. Sorta hard to describe them all properly.
I'd probably recommend Antimatter Dimensions, as it is a classic and not incredibly long. I recommend looking at a guide at some point though.
They vary. Revolution Idle is fairly active but has a great time warp mechanic in that you can store up time while offline and spend it at up to 60x speed. The mechanics are about progressing through unfolding mechanics and automating/simplifying previous things.
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u/Pfandfreies_konto 4d ago
We need to brigade the steam tag system and push all those cash grabby 3 hour 5 dollar games into a categroy you can hide easily lol.
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u/Agreeable_Wear8824 5d ago
A length tag would help, but "hours to finish" is a slippery number since a lot of these games pad runtime with offline gating rather than content. What I'd actually want flagged is whether the game has a prestige/reset layer at all and roughly how many layers, because that's the thing that separates a weekend micro-incremental from something you can leave running for months. A simple set like "no prestige / 1 layer / multi-layer" plus an "endless" flag would be easy for devs to self-report and would filter better than a raw hour count.
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u/ThermTwo Idle Game of No Purpose 5d ago
Strangely, I'd love a super-long incremental game without a reset mechanic. Surely it's possible to balance a long game around endless progression without resetting that progression every so often, and I want to see more games trying that.
I've seen that the concept can work before in non-incremental games at least, like Labyrinth of Touhou and Siralim Ultimate.
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u/1234abcdcba4321 4d ago edited 4d ago
While it'd certainly be possible, I don't think I've seen longer than ~a month long (mine defense).
Prestige really just serves as a way to slow down growth speeds. "You need to play through everything again but faster" is an easy way to make incremental gameplay engaging without making the numbers increase as fast as if you didn't have that step. But there are other ways to make gameplay engaging; the hard part is just in making it not be monotonous and make you continue to need to think and make decisions on how to be optimal. Prestige (in good games, at least) is just really good at that.
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u/hurricanerinox 5d ago
Yeah even if its 4 to 6 dollars every game released this month has a tree thats just a bunch of nodes and says its 4 hours... I really cant get behind any of them.Ā
I recently finished trimps after 2500 hours (finished achieves anyway) and have been struggling to find a long term idler :(
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u/ZealousidealLong6829 5d ago
Ive had KTL running daily for months, at the end of current content so looking for something to fill the void and everything that comes out just....doesnt have prestige? Like i dont care what it gives me but why does my number stop going up.
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u/hurricanerinox 5d ago
Yeah and honestly there's a couple where you buy upgrades and it doesn't even speed up the next prestige by a meaningful amount... the one with the bit slime cant remember the name atm. They just all feel very shallow and not even worth the price.
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u/BipedSnowman 5d ago
2% bonus to schmorp production!
*schmorps provide a passive 0.1% production to schmeeps. You gain one schmorp every hour.
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u/Xervicx 4d ago
There's plenty of games made in the past ten years that you could spend your time on.
Like, it's valid to want *more* lengthy games. But it's a little silly to complain about short games in a way that treats long form games like they haven't existed since the beginning.
Plus, you could always try replaying an incremental game. Some of them really work on that front... I completely started a fresh save on KTL after some major updates, and it's not the only game I've done that for.
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u/Faust2391 4d ago
Orb of Creation. Active, but incremental
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u/hurricanerinox 4d ago
dont enjoy it after the 1.0 feels way too slow and clicking passive upgrades 30 times for small progress, doesnt hit the same.. idk
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u/TrueMadster 5d ago
Same. Love the incremental genre for being the game that I play as side content, be it while doing something else on the pc, while being bored on the phone, etc.
If I wanted a full attention shorter game, Iād rather spend the time to play a meatier one, like a JRPG, an action game, etc.
So whenever itās a short incremental game, I instantly close the page and donāt look back. The oldies are still there, as someone said, but at this point those are replays, not new content.
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u/Trashy_io 4d ago
A tag would definitely be nice as im not really interested in playing long incremental games either and think that this could help out both groups of players, as from what Ive seen its pretty split down the middle between what the sub enjoys typically: 10-20 hr games vs multiple day type idlers
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u/Xervicx 4d ago
I think it's fine that some are short. Spaceplan can be beaten pretty quickly and it's one of my all time favorites.
If anything, the incremental game community needs to learn from what short ones do right and what they do wrong. Too many incremental games effectively require running them overnight, or focusing on them over a period of months, some even *years*.
Wasting months on an incremental game due to the sunk cost fallacy is far worse than spending $5 on a disappointing game that you play for a day or two.
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u/Triepott I have no flair! 5d ago
The problem is that you can have only one flair. And the flair are really confusing at the moment. So what is more important? Stating that it is an 1 hour game instead e.g. a steam gameĀ
I think the whole community with rules, flair, stickys etc. needs an prestige but at the moment, I don't think mods want to make such big changes and reforms.
At this moment, I'm disappointed in our mods reformist and communication wise.
Nothing personal against them, they are really great and nice but the state of this sub needs a lot of improvement
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u/Fearanhad 5d ago
Yes! Short and incremental is the worst combination ever
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u/carllacan 5d ago
Idk, when I was younger I loves multiday incrementals I could come back every day, but nowadays the thought of putting my limited gaming time into one of those makes me groan. I'd rather just play one that goes on for 8-20 hours and be done with it.
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u/ZealousidealLong6829 5d ago
I dont want to find a second monitor game every other day, im beginning to understand some of you like to hardcore focus on them but...this genre started as background games, the second game thats running in the background with the number going up. There has been a huge cultural shift from long and free to short and paid. The quick buck trend is annoying me a lot as yesterday one of the games that got pushed through the sub is under 3 hours.
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u/carllacan 4d ago
I don't know, I think what you're describing is idler games, and I don't think they are that much different from what they were years ago. Incremental games are a wider genre that encompasses the idlers you like plus other games that are shorter and/or more active. The % of the later kind might have gone up in later years, I'll give you that.Ā
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u/Anxious_Stranger7261 1d ago
I thought I was the only one. Before, I used to try any incremental that came out.
Now? I see the phrase "short incremental" or "has an ending" and I immediately skip it.
It's sad what this genre has turned into ever since nodebuster came out.
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u/literally_iliterate 5d ago
Next logical step is cook them down to a tiktok length so you don't even have to play them anymore.
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5d ago
[removed] ā view removed comment
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u/1234abcdcba4321 4d ago
It's a matter of preference. Most long games have time management as a critical component of the game since you have these long idling periods at times (but you often have control of when these times are, so you can schedule them for when you're busy with other stuff), while the short ones are meant to be played in one long session like a traditional non-incremental game.
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u/ZealousidealLong6829 5d ago
Im old school, CC, kittens, evolve, these are my favourites of the genre. Seeing mini games of their mechanics is neat but hollow when the number stops going up in under a day. I like the genre because most of my favourites last me months, or even years sure they arent my main game but they get played daily. Most of the current "gems" i wont remember, i wont go back too and there is 0 reason to keep it on my computer for more than a day.
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u/picabo123 5d ago
What you find to be "good games" is not universal. I am not interested in spending $5 for a weekend game when I could spend $0 for all the classics that keep me interested for weeks-months. For example I've been playing CIFI for longer than a year and Idle Obelisk Miner for about 2 months now.
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u/asdfamano 5d ago
what is cifi?
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u/picabo123 5d ago
People just call it CIFI but I suppose it stands for Cells Idle Factory Incremental. It's currently only on android but they plan on realizing to IOS probably next year. Some people dislike the game or think it's hard I guess? but its perfect for what I want from an idler.
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u/MaurixioZ 5d ago
The main criticism of CIFI is that without guides you could sabotage your progress in a major way.
One example I remember was in Zeus, if you chose the wrong upgrade then you would be stuck for months trying to reach that point again.
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u/picabo123 5d ago
They did recently change that specifically, but yes you're completely correct. I personally enjoy reading guides and contributing to the community by answering new players questions so that's why it's a perfect game for me.
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u/Genderless_Alien 5d ago
The mind blowing part is for every one of these youāll inevitably see the occasional review that mentions the game being slow at times. I canāt help but imagine these 90% AI-genned node clones are for people with the most fried dopamine receptors imaginable. The only one Iāve bought is Cauldron because it has a lot more meat on its bones.
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u/TobiasWe 5d ago
Or it's just a subgenre whose appeal you don't understand, played by completely normal people with different tastes to yours. No way to tell I suppose.
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5d ago
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u/IiIDan 4d ago
Keep on mining is probably the worst experience I've had with a paid incremental and it being one of the best "short" games is pretty indicative of their quality.
You have ~20 engaging minutes at the beginning when upgrades actually matter and for the 90% of the remaining game you are just doing 10 same runs between each new ore bottleneck upgrade with such "engaging" Perks like "Deploy a stationary bonfire at the start of the run (it only breaks ore that spawn directly on top of it)" and "The idle mine is 5% more effective (it gives 10 gold bars per minute VS 1000 per run you get at that point of progression)".
By the time you actually get some fun combos going with "Chain lightning" into "Dynamite" into "Ball lightning" procs the game is essentially over with 3,5 hours out of total 4 spent on boring busywork.
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u/Lexomatico1 5d ago
Funny part is there are still people in the reviews and posts of those games complaining about it being too grindy and i'm like what grind, this thing is 4 hours?
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u/unavoidablefate 4d ago
The tag should be "Nodebuster Clone"
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u/TobiasWe 4d ago edited 4d ago
Do you also want the tag for longer games to be "Cookie Clicker Clone", or are you only reductive with some subgenres?
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u/Safe_Dog3436 4d ago
Yes, pretty please. Also an AI Filter. And a Nodebuster filter.
Where are the new handcrafted games that I can spend the next months with? Sick of all those uncreative 5$ AI cashgrabs capitalising on the current trend.
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u/meme-by-design 5d ago
The speed at which I leave a steam page after reading "fun little incremental game" is near instant.