This is the only idle game I have ever played, so all of the mechanics here were completely new to me and I am not sure how many of them were pioneered by Orteil nor how many of them are unique to this game, so I'm not sure how this game would feel to play as an idle game connoisseur. Regardless, as an idle game novice, the cocktail of mechanics that Cookie Clicker has to offer all come together to make an experience that is at times intriguing, boring, exhilarating, analytical, monotonous, and more.

I assume most people are familiar with the general premise of the game: you get cookies by clicking on a big cookie, spend cookies to buy things to click the cookie for you, and use your increased cookie income to buy things that click the cookie faster, and so on and so forth. Before I started playing this game 2 years ago, I wasn't aware of the many other mechanics that are present in Cookie Clicker which are the actually compelling parts of the game. There are abilities that the player can actively use to generate cookies that are much more interesting than simply buying more towers to generate cookies faster. Golden cookies are an obvious example of this, they will briefly appear every few minutes, and if you notice and click them, they will activate one of a few effects that will significantly increase your cookie production. However, golden cookies are far from the only example of secondary means to generate cookies, and I would even say they are the least interesting one. There are self described "minigames" in Cookie Clicker that allow you to manage unique resources to affect your cookie production in many unique ways. My favorite of them is the farming minigame, which allows you to grow crops that can change the properties of many other mechanics, until the associated crops expire. What makes this minigame so cool is that it synergizes with all of the game's other mechanics. There are crops to increase cookie production, decrease shop prices, make golden cookies appear more often, increase the potency of other crops, etc. The farm gives the player lots of room to think of creative ways to achieve many cookie related goals, and a big part of the fun I had playing this game was finding the best minigame strategies to maximize my cookies. This becomes exhilarating after you learn how to effectively synergize multiple of these mechanics simultaneously, leading to explosive amounts of cookies being produced at exponentially faster rates than is otherwise possible.

While I think that minigames are the most interesting mechanics in Cookie Clicker, the most powerful ability would have to be its legacy mechanics. Cookie Clicker is a legacy game, meaning that you will repeatedly start 'new' save files that are altered by the previous ones. How that manifests here is through ascensions, which cause you to lose all of your resources (towers, cookies, and upgrades) from that run in exchange for permanent upgrades on all future runs. There is an ascension skill tree that holds many powerful and unique upgrades, many of which are absurdly expensive the first time you reach the shop. But the permanent upgrades that you unlock each ascension will quickly allow you to bridge the gap between your available resources and the cost of each new milestone upgrade. This is one of the greatest joys to be found in the game: reaching levels of income and resources that previously seemed ludicrously unattainable. The first time I ascended to a new legacy was one of the incredibly exciting peaks that Cookie Clicker has to offer for those who allow themselves to become invested in their cookie production speed. My cookie production potential increased by multiple orders of magnitude and my new run was flying past milestones that took me days in the previous legacy, in only a matter of minutes!

While there are incredibly satisfying and exciting moments to be found in Cookie Clicker, the majority of the time the game is open will be generally uninteresting and low-maintenance, it is an idle game after all. This makes it hard to pinpoint a specific level of enjoyment that the game provides while playing it, since you are meant to give it varying levels of engagement. And, obviously, the less engaged with the game you are, the less you will have the capacity to be actively enjoying it. I think that the rhythm of the game is pretty easy to intuit in the early and mid-game, where you will be clicking golden cookies and buying new upgrades every few minutes, but as you continue ascending and attaining higher and higher levels of cookie production, the rate you buy new upgrades will slow to be hours, days, or even weeks apart. I have been slowly becoming less and less invested with my save file as I have attained every upgrade and almost every achievement. Because ascensions become less and less powerful the more stacked your legacy already is, I have to wait months for ascending to be worthwhile. The exponentially growing cost of additional towers quickly stagnates the growth rate of my cookie production within each run, and the only way to make a meaningful amount of cookies is to partake in tedious minimaxing of the cookie grimoire and golden cookie spawns. The reason I have persevered so long has been to try and reach the last 3 achievements I need for 100% game completion. I honestly should have bailed a long time ago and only continued chasing the last few achievements due to sunk cost. The worst, and downright unenjoyable, parts of the game are all backloaded. I wish that the achievements were better paced so that you could achieve the last few much earlier, when the game was still exciting at times, which would make for a much better clean stopping point to retire the game.

Despite the slog that the game becomes when hunting down the last few achievements, Cookie Clicker is a pleasant experience for the first many months of play with some extremely high highs. Everyone should honestly try it because it is free and such low commitment. Just DO NOT go for every achievement because getting the last dozen or so is a bad time.

I baked cookies, then I baked more cookies.

It was never enough, it still isn’t enough, I’m still hungry.

I’ll destroy the world time after time again, just to bake more cookies. I’ll enslave hundreds and hundreds of elderly individuals, just to bake more.

I’m not done, I’ll never be done…