timeless classic

Okay but seriously, most people don't realize just how much there is to this game. Yes, it's an idle game you can just leave running, but there's so many calculations, statistics, and optimizations in this game. There's a hidden farming system, a STOCK MARKET system, a system where you can switch between passives with tradeoffs and a cost (further complicating how you want to optimize the game), and a magic system where you can do a number of things based on RNG and a percentage of your current total cookies. And an interesting legacy system where you need to carefully consider what kind of upgrades you want to carry into the next playthrough.

This game is super accessible and completely free, try it out if you want a fun time waster or are just into games involving management and statistics.

Clicker games are basically just the junk food of video games, pretty much where it solely distills the game out into incrementals and achievements and pretty much nothing else. Like with just rewards mechanisms going off in your head and nothing really more substantial to do with level design, gameplay, storyline or anything else that would typically go on in a video game.

Cookie Clicker is one of the biggest examples of those types of games, the type of thing where you're likely to turn it off after 5 minutes or keep playing to the point where a "Grandma" just seems like an abstract concept as you obtain even more cookies. Although, I do like the detail here where everything becomes continually more hellish as you start to expand - pretty much where the entire universe is corrupted and destroyed solely for the process of making cookies.

The developers of this game knew what they were doing here and who they were appealing to here, although its the kind of thing where they were more on the message of "Look at what's happening with you playing this game." whilst still leading you on, rather than just outright telling you to just stop playing the game such as with Edmund McMillan's game AVGM.

At least this game was vaguely honest unlike a whole lot of other clicker games, and thank god this game doesn't contain microtransactions to "speed up your progress" and the like, such as with other games of the same ilk.

Cookie Clicker is not really a game, but more so an interesting case study on how games can tap into humans extrinsic motivation through gameplay mechanics, no matter how repetitive and dull that may be. It's only natural that people will feel some sense of reward to see big numbers go up, even if what they did was not challenging or interesting in the slightest, they just helped the gears turned. While we lament trashy low-effort work like this, the reality is that every game has a form of Cookie Clicker baked into it to exploit that extrinsic motivation we all have, it just does a better job masking that cookie smell.