Upload Labs

Let me be clear. This is NOT an automation game. It is an idle game like cookie clicker very loosely disguised as a factory game. You have one of each production unit. That means you cannot scale up at all. You literally are just waiting to click the upgrade button that increases your income by 100% over and over and over. Tier up just increases money, no nuance. The free to play is to lure in people to pay for boosts etc. Terrible and honestly disgusting design.

I had to uninstall this game for my own good.
I just played 15 hours in one sitting.
It's currently 8 am.
I am not okay.

A fun game whose underlying ideas are incompatibile with humanity's capacity to survive climate collapse and must be destroyed at all costs. It's techbro nonsense and not the fun kind, there's cyrptocurrency and LLM glazing and presenting all that stuff as necessary to save humanity, without a hint of irony. If you're at all critical of "longtermism" or other assorted silicon valley brainrot, you're gonna have to either pass or get used to rolling your eyes when you see the game insist that you gotta progress through the chatbot tech tree to reach Artificial General Intelligence.

It's primarily an incremental ilder game with automation elements. Don't come into this thinking it's gonna be Factorio or mistake those sweeping shots in the promo video to be a sign that these are going to be huge megaprojects - the game quite deliberately abstracts away as much as possible. If you set up a particular process like file upload, don't expect to have to be copying and pasting it, you'll instead be either modifying that setup to make it more complex later or simply upgrading it in place or adjusting the resources you're pouring into it.

Instead, most of the game is simply trying to figure out what all you can do and determining when is the most efficient time to change what it is you're doing. You'll quickly figure out you'll want to change what file type you're using to earn money fairly quickly, but the game will offer new things to spend your compute and download on. You'll have GPU's and you'll need to figure out whether it's even worth mining cryptocurrency with it or if you're better off converting it at half value to generic compute to help you with file processing for uploads, you'll take what you learned with file processing for uploads to determine how much you want to research. You'll then try to do a balancing act between making money and research (clock and then eventually network management upgrades really help here) as research gets bottlenecked by your labs while uploads can go as fast as your network and compute permits. And then you keep unlock new mechanics and resources.

And so where a game like Factorio has you building really sprawling bases you quickly lose the ability to entirely comprehend, Upload Labs makes actually executing on your ideas really frictionless so that you can just quickly do the thing and go back to watching number go up. It is an idler, it doesn't try to keep you constantly busy doing things and wants to sit on another screen or virtual desktop for most of your day while you do something else. And that's cool.

The game is highly abstract, not just in terms of its presentation as a node chart but in how it handles the topics it brings up. Coding has an "if" statement and variables but they're just reskinned minining, you mine variables and combine them to make a resource to then make a final product (called "optimization code") that you then feed back to your programmer to earn them XP to do the same thing faster, only ocassionally taking them off task to actually earn you upgrade points to make some other process more efficient. You are basically a tech CEO in this game, you gloss over everything and just attach to buzzwords, everything is just a process of extraction. Horrifying as an actual real world ideology that is destroying our planet as parasitic data centers get built near our homes against our wills and incidentally also drives up the cost of gaming hardware, but very accessible for an incremental idler game.

There's also some microtransactions. It's a free game and the MTX isn't really shoved in your face, but it's annoyingly temporary stuff as though they expect recurrent spending out of some whales. So, uh, don't do that. If you feel tempted, stop playing and go play something else.

It's a fun game for what it is, it's just going to come down to how much you can gloss over how very obviously this game would have integrated NFT's into its tech tree if it had came out a couple years earlier. It annoyed the hell out of me despite me appreciating its basic gameplay loop, I listen to podcasts like Better Offline and This Machine Kills so I can't really not think of the kind of blowhard that thinks this is how the world really works, but that's probably not going to be as big an issue for most people. Just don't take what it's trying to convince you will "save the world" seriously.