Asbury Pines

Asbury Pines starts out like a Twin Peak-esque game. It is set in a small town in 2025, surrounded by pinetrees. It is the usual sleepy town - a sheriff who just wants to get home; a raging insane women, shouting on the streets; a gas station employee doing chores. Then one day a young women is murdered - decapitated, in fact, however, it is done absolutely cleanly. No footprints, no handprints, no signs of struggle - it’s like she killed herself. You have to find out who her killer is. That is when the time travel starts. Time goes forward, first, so you see a post-apocalyptic version of the city after the internet has been taken down globally, and anarchy sets in. Then you go back. Or to be more precise: you start to experience the past of the town as well. First the 1999, Y2K Version, with the same character's younger version, new locations, old locations during their golden era. Then another era appears: 1990. Then you experience more and more eras, going back hundreds of years, and eventually, back to the stone age. But all of these timelines happen parallel to each other - and you have to manage the life of the town. You have to scavenge for resources, you have to turn them into products. You have to assign the members of the town to these posts. And whatever you find in the past, part of it can be used in the future, where, for example, food becomes super scarce, yet it is abundant in the future. Every action you take, every step you make usually results in a new bit of story unlocking. A day in a person's life. A snippet of text messages. A newspaper clipping. A piece of diary, telling about the person, or the town, or some events. Then you experience the same - with animals, plants. They are also part of the story, of the everyday life of the town. You see how a tree experiences hundreds of years, the inhabitants of the town And the twist is: this is not an adventure or a strategy game. It is an incremental / idle game. Which means that the story is already written, you are just uncovering it in a bit of a random order. Most of the things are happening passively, but you have to make decision about everything. Where to send people to work, what to scavenge for, how to utilize it. You are constantly receiving resources - basically automatically - and you have to use it. It has extreme uses as well because you have 3 different research trees. At one you can research new forms of government which makes the life and work of the characters more efficient, or more impactful. You can also do the same with religions, like forming a cult of the sloth, which makes worksites yield more resources with more downtime You also research "technologies" which achieve the same. This process can take 24-48hrs - in real time - depending on how many people you assign to said task, and how good they are. Then they die - yet work still. Anything and everything can happen in Asbury Pines. And it is brilliant. You don’t see it at first, you don’t see it after 5 hours, but every single character, every piece of information is part of a massive tapestry, which you are uncovering strand by stran. It has 50+ characters, 350+ story snippets. And they are all written AMAZINGLY. Fitting to their character, their style, and in various formats. It is unlike any game I have ever played. And revolutionary in the genre, where theme is always just a layer - it was always about numbers going up. Here, numbers also grow and getting bigger, but in the meantime, you experience a complete, super long story as well. An amazing achievement – one of the best games of 2025 for me.

First of all if you are not from the USA you will miss 75% of the references. It is more of the book than a game. The game part of it is weird. Respect to the devs for going for something innovative rather than bland more of the same.

As someone who generally does not play any idle/incremental games, this one was quite the surprise. Having an unfolding narrative that is drip fed through the incremental system is a genius idea that gives an actual purpose and objective to seeing the numbers go up, other than for the sake of seeing the numbers go up. [h3]What was Great:[/h3] [list] [*] Having a meaningful reason to have a game loaded up to run idle and increment in the background, getting bits of narrative and world building elements to check back to every so often made the game very inticing to stick with. [*] Excellent writing, world building and characters. I was always interested in what / who will be showing up next.[/list] [h3]What was Good:[/h3] [list] [*] The story and progression was structured well, although the setting itself wasn't normally what I would gravitate towards, it was still enjoyable to progress through time and unfold the tapestry. [*] Music was nice to have jamming quietly in the background while I was doing other tasks, hopefully a few more tracks get added over time. [*] The art style was simple and effective, I enjoyed seeing how characters looked over long periods of time and the new locations that were discovered.[/list] [h3]What was OK:[/h3] [list] [*] A fairly plain and serviceable user interface that did the job after a bit of fiddling around between all the tabs early on. [*] Some of the perk unlocks drag out longer than the story itself, this isn't too bad considering there is an offline progression system up to a certain point which helps a bit of the longer research unlocks towards the end.[/list] [h3]Overall:[/h3] An unique experience, providing a wealth of interesting narritive, characters and world building fed through the drinking straw of an incremental idler system. I will be sad to see this no longer be chugging along in the background on my desktop once I have hit 100%, but it will be remembered as a great ride for the price of admission. Kudos to the 2 man dev team, in my opinion the whole experience is well worth the asking price. Looking forward to what comes next.