Returning To Cookie Clicker

 

Back in 2013 I caught wind of a little game called Cookie Clicker, a silly little browser game where you click on a cookie to make a number go up.  When you have enough cookies you can buy buildings that make cookies for you and the goal of the game is to make number go up and nothing more.  

Somehow this game became a sort of internet sensation and gave rise of a plethora of imitators thus giving birth to the "idle game".  A genre where you fiddle with a thing for a bit and then you have the game basically play itself and you come back to check on it every so often to buy upgrades to make whatever number you're trying to raise go up faster.  For the most part it's a pretty insipid genre that isn't worth your time at all full of low quality titles made by devs looking to get something quick into their portfolio or worse, to try and get a quick buck out of you for very little effort.

But during a particularly boring work day I got curious and decided to return to the OG after 10 years to see if it was the same old silly distraction and was surprised just to see how much it had expanded.  I didn't think there was a lot you could do with a game that's solely about clicking on a cookie to get buildings to get more cookies but it seems I was mistaken.

The standard cookie clicking, building aquring gameplay is still there but now you can harvest Sugar Lumps once ever 24 hours to upgrade the buildings for greater efficiency but there are a few buildings that, when upgraded have mini games attatched to them now.  For example one of the buildings you can buy is a bank and when upgraded with a sugar lump you get access to a simulation of a stock market where you can buy and sell goods that change value every 15 minutes or so and you can get a quick burst of cookies if you invest wisely.  It comes complete with the ability to upgrade it further with sub-buildings and brokers and it comes with a full on graph that updates in real time and it's not very complicated, sure, but its an interesting addition considering the main game that it's attatched to.

Another feature that is new from when I played it all those years ago is the ascention system.  When you bake a certain number of cookies you can ascend, as in lose everything you currently have, for a permanent buff and a token to spend on a staggeringly large talent tree.  I have no idea what half the upgrades even are as they are hidden behind branching pathways I can't see yet but the most useful one so far has been the one that allows cookies to build up at a reduced rate while the game is closed.

The game has so much stuff going on in it now that there's a dedicated wiki for it and even that's telling me about stuff that I haven't, after about a month of playing, haven't even caught a whiff off yet.  For example there's a thing called the "Grandmapocolypse" which involves making all the grandmas you bought get mad at you for some reason and the game starts spawning "wrinklers" or something and I have no idea what those are.  The art changes to this sort of weird horror-esque mural and it all sounds very strange and I think the mystery of what this feature is exactly has me captivated enough to keep an tab open every day that I fiddle with between other games and housework.

It has got me wondering if there are similarly fleshed out and feature heavy idle games out there that might be worth a look but unfortunately the genre is full of so much garbage that it will probably forever remain a mystery and I'm more than happy to just sit here and bake cookies for eternity