I got introduced to this game recently (read: @zen shamelessly gifted it to me out of nowhere, how dare he) and it might be the best idle/clicker-style game I've ever played.
It follows what I'd call the 'formula' fairly closely, at least on the surface—you have a big rock, and a bunch of little guys (gnorps), and every time a little guy hits the rock, you get some resources. Use resources to buy upgrades, upgrades let you hit the rock harder/faster, repeat until madness consumes the world. It's a great metaphor for capitalism, or something. I dunno.
But where it shines is in the management, which feels a lot closer to what I'd expect from a strategy or city-building game. When someone strikes the rock, it doesn't immediately turn into money—it sprinkles shiny shards off to the side, which pile up in a heap with primitive falling-sand-style physics. You need gnorps to physically run out to the heap, pick up the shards, run back to your coffers, and dump them in. Suddenly the logistics become complicated. How do you balance your rock-smashing gnorps with your rock-retrieving gnorps? How do you minimize travel time between the heap and your grubby little stash? Certain attacks cause shards to spray out in different arcs and at different distances, changing the shape and distribution of the heap, but you can also massage it into a more desirable shape with special heap management gnorps—mountaineers who scale and flatten out the peaks, or hulks who send out shock waves, shifting the entire pile laterally.
Like many management games, once you get the basics up and running it starts to feel like a beautiful machine; something you can optimise through educated prodding and poking, or simply watch smoothly ticking over. But like an idle game, there are no fail states and no real consequences for leaving it to its own devices.
This isn't to say the game doesn't feature any challenges. Many upgrades are dependent on achieving a certain heap size, after which the heap will "compress", effectively flattening itself out and becoming more dense. The big shards of yesterday become the tiny flecks of tomorrow, and pretty soon, creating a heap of sufficient size becomes difficult. Left in the open for too long, shards gradually get slurped back up into the rock, like iron filings around a magnet. You cannot produce a large enough heap by simply telling one poor bugger to punch the rock and leaving them to it—you need to be putting out shards faster than they're coming back in. In other words, there are actual goals for optimisation. It's an idle game where, if you set up your little guys wrong, no amount of time will be enough. You cannot fill a bucket full of holes, no matter how long you run it under the tap.
Fortunately, there's prestiging.
This is one of those nauseating video game verbs which, as I've come to understand it, means "do it again, but with a shiny badge next to your name". Here, it functions as more of a way to voluntarily tap out when you hit a progress wall, taking your accumulated perk points and starting over. The game's meta-progression, accessed between runs, takes the form of a lengthy perk tree, full of special upgrades that change the behaviour of certain gnorps or systems. This gives you a chance to try a different tack every time you reset, and experiment with different builds to focus in on. There's a real satisfaction to finding a truly obscene combination of perks, gnorps, and upgrades—not just the usual perverse pleasure of number-go-up, but the feeling of having engineered something clever as you sail past your previous record.
It's also just really cute, and pleasant to look at. I like watching my little guys running around at mach speed. I like the soundtrack, which gives DOS game vibes with its FM-synth-style covers of public domain music. I like how a bunch of upgrades look like physics glitches in action until you realise what's going on. There's a sense of humour to the tooltips and lots of fun little details in the sprites. I started playing it while doing baking for Christmas, and it was the perfect little thing to come back to and check whenever I was ignoring the looming pile of dishes in the sink.
Good stuff. I'm a fan.
