Idle Game 1 is a very minimalist, very simple idle game that takes some of the core ideas of classic incremental games and reduces them to basic interactions, removing most of the player choice you’d find into a more advanced title, but still leaving just enough to create an interesting loop where you very quickly reset your game multiple times in a row until you can reset for a bigger bonus. I didn’t stick with it until the end, but I still found it kinda neat.
You basically have nine money producing ‘buildings’ that all have a different production rate, amount produced and purchase cost. You upgrade them to get more money faster until you have enough to buy the next thing, which costs way more than the previous thing. There’s no tapping anywhere so you’re basically just waiting to get enough money. The ultimate goal of the game is to get to the end of the building list and then research very expensive ‘things’ that are supposed to unlock ‘the meaning of life’. Buying a certain number of upgrades for your buildings drastically improves their output, so the first one will become your highest earner if you get it to level 400.
As you unlock new buildings - or research the meaning of life ‘things’ - you’ll be able to reset for prestige. Prestige gives you either a production boost, a production speed or a cost reduction for one of your random buildings. This is certainly an interesting choice, but it can get a bit frustrating when run after run the prestige luck fails to upgrade anything worthwhile and you just need to keep trying until you finally get a boost on one of your big money makers. Sometimes you’ll also get upgrades that are just plain useless, like reducing the cost of a building you can now instantly maximize. This number grows as you keep progressing, so sometimes it’s better to wait a few minutes to get a bigger prestige reward than to prestige immediately for a smaller value. This is pretty much the extent of the player choice in this game.
Then there’s the strange ‘Cheat’ in-app purchase that is basically buying not-random prestige, which starts at understandable numbers but at some points offers ‘infinite’ prestige for 6.99$, something I haven’t tried. What does the game mean by ‘infinite’ prestige? Does it mean that everything produces infinite money infinitely fast at no cost? That doesn’t make much sense.
At some point I was done with Idle Game 1. It has a fairly simple and clean style and some interesting mechanics (or lack thereof) but just not enough meat on its bones to keep my interest for much longer. I wouldn’t really recommend it, except as a game design curiosity, or if you’re really bored and need to look at some numbers go up!
