Marking as "completed" as it's functionally endless, and we have all heavenly upgrades (Orteil's personal metric for the game's "completion").
All you really need to know is that we have a save file in this game literally a decade old and counting, and we're still actively playing it. We think we might like this video game.
But, well, to explain it a bit more, Cookie Clicker is basically a zen garden in video game form to us. Something a lot of idle games that followed in Cookie Clicker's footsteps fail to really capture is that sense of slow, steady progress; active play can expedite things drastically, yes, but it's very hard to get to a point where you are effectively stonewalled from any form of progress at all in Cookie Clicker. There's always something to do. There's always more cookies to bake, there's always more things to make the number go up, there's always some sort of distraction to get engrossed in like the Garden.
Even as times change, even as the real world shifts rapidly, there's always something going on in Cookie Clicker, and you can always laser-focus on what it is you specifically want to do, knowing you'll be making steady progress the whole way through. And that is an extremely powerful thing for a game that has basically only like, 2 online components, to be able to possess. Especially given one of them is "you can play it in your web browser". Pretty much the only game we can think of that manages to have that same hook without being some sort of always-online game is Animal Crossing. Of all games, right?
Also, we guess we've made a few mods for it...
All you really need to know is that we have a save file in this game literally a decade old and counting, and we're still actively playing it. We think we might like this video game.
But, well, to explain it a bit more, Cookie Clicker is basically a zen garden in video game form to us. Something a lot of idle games that followed in Cookie Clicker's footsteps fail to really capture is that sense of slow, steady progress; active play can expedite things drastically, yes, but it's very hard to get to a point where you are effectively stonewalled from any form of progress at all in Cookie Clicker. There's always something to do. There's always more cookies to bake, there's always more things to make the number go up, there's always some sort of distraction to get engrossed in like the Garden.
Even as times change, even as the real world shifts rapidly, there's always something going on in Cookie Clicker, and you can always laser-focus on what it is you specifically want to do, knowing you'll be making steady progress the whole way through. And that is an extremely powerful thing for a game that has basically only like, 2 online components, to be able to possess. Especially given one of them is "you can play it in your web browser". Pretty much the only game we can think of that manages to have that same hook without being some sort of always-online game is Animal Crossing. Of all games, right?
Also, we guess we've made a few mods for it...