// PC GAMER — GAMING
Steam Week in Review: 54 idle games released on Steam last week, and many look eerily similar
All the interesting Steam facts for the week ending September 6.
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When Cookie Clicker and Candy Box both released in quick succession in 2013, I remember them being received mostly as a joke, or else as an amusing parody of "watch numbers go up" RPG gameplay. Then something weird happened: all my colleagues became fixated on Cookie Clicker. So did I. Lots of people on the internet, on Twitter and in various forums like Reddit, confessed to having become addicted to it.
Cookie Clicker did have an antecedent in Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker, which was a very deliberate satire. But Cookie Clicker wasn't presented as satire. And yet, it was so transparently meaningless that people doubted it could be anything else. You click a cookie repeatedly to generate more cookies. Once you earn enough cookies, you can invest those cookies into various ways of expediting the cookie making process. You click and watch numbers go up. It's stupid.
Fast forward more than a decade later and idlers, also known as incremental games, are massive on Steam. Last week, 54 games with the tag "idler" released. In total, there are 4,314 games with that tag on Steam.
Some of these look pretty good as far as idlers go. Next Reign: Kingdom has pretty handmade pixel art, atmospheric music and strategic elements. We Need More Humans! Has a novel premise—you have to become increasingly proficient at abducting humans—and, as far as this genre goes, a distinctive art style. Zad Archery's art style, on the other hand, is very generic but it has nearly 700 "mostly positive" reviews, so it must be doing something right.
None of those listed above are likely to rival genre heavyweights like Bongo Cat (currently being played by 135,803 people), Task Bar Hero (66,292 people) and Banana (3,628). But they have at least managed to rise above the onslaught of idler AI slop. The vast majority of the idlers that released on Steam last week have an AI disclosure.
And many of them look oddly, almost uncannily similar. Compare the UIs in the gallery below:
There's a special fondness for a roughly similar shade of blue, isn't there? They are not pleasant UIs. What is going on here? Why do these games all look roughly the same?
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