Widget Inc.

Hey, not bad. Recently my wife's been feeling pretty down, so as a distraction I suggested she play Cookie Clicker. As you'd expect, she got really into it, and watching her play it made me want to revisit it - so I did, and found it kinda lacking in the current day and age. But I still wanted to play a good clicker, and I stumbled upon this. Hey, why not? Well, calling this a clicker is a bit misleading. It actually feels a lot more like Factorio or Satisfactory - but without the conveyor belt spaghotheosis. Instead of placing factories, planning logistics, all that jazz, you just place frames. And yeah, you can upgrade them, but later on you'll probably end up relying on the auto-upgrader because of the sheer scale of your facilities. The progression system is exactly like in Satisfactory. You make stuff, turn it into other stuff, connect it with some other stuff and you get Capital S Stuff. You need to spend a bunch of Capital S Stuff to unlock the next tier. From there it's a similar process, but some of the stuff requires also stuff you've made in previous tiers - so you need to expand your current tier, but also the lower tiers need to keep up. There's a helpful inventory screen that shows you the numbers: production, consumption, and maximum possible production. So keep up! Except this is a clicker game. So the frame costs rise with every new purchase, so "just scale up" is not as simple as it would be in Satisfactorio. At the same time, you don't need to worry about logistics at all - everything just teleports around as far as the mechanics are concerned - so it is also much simpler than in these games. The logistics system has been replaced by this now familiar system of placement puzzles - as you upgrade your frames, they might start getting bonuses from being placed in a specific way; and, thankfully, these little puzzles are very varied - so there's going to be plenty of spatial fun. Oh, and the map is seemingly infinite and there is no combat, so you don't need to worry about keeping things tight. Unfortunately, the game gets a little samey roughly halfway through, as it becomes clear that all tiers follow the exact same formula (except, strangely, the last one). What mitigates this somewhat is the aforementioned reliance on the previous tiers - but also the wonderful variety of clicker minigames. Every item has its own unique production system if you do it by hand. Some are more fun than others, some I found borderline unplayable, but overall it's really good stuff! Far better than just clickety clickety click on the damn eldritch cookie. But don't let that deter you. It's still a pretty fun time, although it's not as engaging as I'd like - best play it with something in the background, which usually is a dealbreaker for me, but somehow not this time. Still, the first half of the game just made me wish I was playing Universal Paperclips instead, so I shut off the game and went to play that. It's still fantastic, by the way. But then I came back to this with a clear head and this time really got into it, and finished it. A decent amount of people do - 22%, give or take, if achievements are any indication. And hey. If nothing else, it's nice to have a more "lite" version of Satisfactorio; I think it's worth playing just to see how well Widget Inc. simplified the formula while keeping it fun. [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/42922988/]More games, but not many of them are clickers[/url]

So the game starts fun (if you enjoy this kind incremental and idle tipes of games) but the prestige mechanic is terrible. When you prestige your resource gain increases linearly (you get a +100% to all res gain from base), but the price to prestige increases geometricaly (it increases by 10% of the last prestige point), So eventually the progress get slower than it was from a fresh new game. Also the cost of every "factory" and upgrades also increase with every prestige, slowing down the speed of progretion to the end game. Usually this incremental/idle games have a game loop that makes the game get faster and faster to the end point, until you reach a new threshold (a second prestige/ascention/or whatever mechanic), but this game is just a single prestige mechanic that gets slower and slower with each new game+. I don't get what the point was...

I am marking this as a yes, because Steam really doesn't have a 'it depends' button. Widget Inc is a reverse idle game. At the start you make your little factory and watch the numbers go brrr... but past tier 9 you have maxed out the upgrades for your lower tiers, so they never get faster. But the resources from them continue to be needed in ever increasing amounts, and you need to spend more to make more factories for those resources each time... so instead of the game getting faster as time passes, like an idle game. It gets slower and slower. Each tier makes the game slow down further, as you struggle to optimize and balance your supply and demand in an ever increasing profit loss scenario. Up to tier 10, this game is a blast! After tier 10, it is just a slog... you just sit staring at your screen waiting for one more resource to tick over, one more thing to happen. And it gets worse the farther you go. The higher tiers need a rebalance to keep this game fun all the way through.