I personally found it to be almost horrifyingly effective at creating an addiction loop, in spite of my full awareness of the fact that it's all just a goofy joke, full of other goofy jokes. The sheer amount of big-number-going-up and the jungle breakbeat soundtrack makes it surprisingly hard to stop?¡ª I recommend setting a timer for, say, half an hour, and then closing the game when that timer runs out.

Fascinating artifact, though! Great production values and some really funny jokes early on especially.
posted by DoctorFedora at 11:40 PM on September 30 [1 favorite]

Unfair Flips is another flip-em-up that just released. It teaches you some things about probability.
posted by Phssthpok at 11:42 PM on September 30 [1 favorite]

Reminds me of Cow Clicker, which was supposed to demonstrate the problems of idle games but became too popular and the developer had to organize an apocalypse to shut down the game:

At this point, the game remained playable, but all the cows were replaced by blank spaces and said to have been raptured. Bogost intended the Cowpocalypse event to signal the "end" of the game to players; when addressing a complaint by a fan who felt the game was no longer fun after the cow rapture, Bogost responded that "it wasn't very fun before."

posted by autopilot at 1:35 AM on October 1 [8 favorites]

It's almost impossible to satirize anything because of in this year of 2025 because .. :: gestures at everything ::

The risk of becoming the Thing in Actuality is .. now high.

?
posted by Faintdreams at 6:32 AM on October 1 [3 favorites]

The demo is 1.96 gigabytes. This is a hell of a long way to go for a joke.

Especially when I just closed it after it started playing "accept this joke EULA but the ACCEPT button starts running away from your mouse cursor", I am looking at this thing with my laptop and I am not about to spend more than six seconds chasing this stupid button with the trackpad.
posted by egypturnash at 7:40 AM on October 1 [3 favorites]

On a similar theme, RPS published "CloverPit is a fun not-gambling roguelite satire of capitalism, but I would quite like us to stop cashing in on our own despair" which is, if nothing else, a killer headline.
posted by Hermione Dies at 7:50 AM on October 1 [4 favorites]

"parody just becomes the thing it's supposed to be mocking" That was the same problem Cow Clicker had.
posted by edselford at 11:11 AM on October 1 [1 favorite]

I actually would put Universal Paperclips in a "Top 5 video games of the 2010s" list, and UP hmmmm is a solid number two even if there's three or four games I'd have to consider for first.

The theming and presentation are so strong, but while it starts out as a clicker there's a lot more to it than most of the other idle clickers I've played. I'm not just talking about the three different stages of gameplay; it's that the value that you're trying to make go up shifts subtly as you play, and you're constantly trying to balance at least two or three counts at once.

I'm probably not going to put too much time into Q-UP, as I'm still smarting from the loss of ten days from putting Balatro on my phone last year. But I do play through Paperclips every couple of years to de-stress when I've got a few hours to kill.
posted by thecaddy at 11:24 AM on October 1

I'm sorry but this is the same tired, snide joke as "sportsball", just wrapped up in new packaging. Pointing to clickers is missing the point, which is the developer saying "what if this field of competitive play was actually all random (like we all know it actually is?)"Which I find to be both insulting (because esports is actually based on skill) and dismissive.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:57 AM on October 1

I'm sorry but this is the same tired, snide joke as "sportsball", just wrapped up in new packaging. Pointing to clickers is missing the point, which is the developer saying "what if this field of competitive play was actually all random (like we all know it actually is?)"

Is that the point? My takeaway was, what if some of the games you like aren't games, but bundles of dark patterns that prey on addictive tendencies? And if you literally, truly, and fully take away what we all know to be the "game" part of these games, would you wind up with an extremely familiar and as-fun experience interacting with a dopamine generator that takes advantage of common traits in human psychology in a deliberate and pointed way, without hiding behind a fig leaf or any pretensions?

Those are interesting questions to me.

Even noticing the bundle of techniques many games use to engage users at a holistic level, rather than focusing in on a particular part of it like "are loot boxes just gambling" or whatever in isolation, feels insightful to me.
posted by Number Used Once at 12:27 PM on October 1 [5 favorites]

> Reminds me of Cow Clicker, which was supposed to demonstrate the problems of idle games but became too popular...

How does that Vonnegut quote go? "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
posted by at by at 12:46 PM on October 1 [2 favorites]

I took that particular bit as a commentary on matchmaking services in online gaming, where ostensibly you're furnished with an opponent at the same skill level as you. And what could that mean, except that the probability function of "wins in matched game" and "wins in a fair coin toss" are the same probability function?

I did play through the demo and another thing of note seems to be seems to be: a "losing flip" in the game doesn't necessarily mean you don't gain things in terms of the various currencies of the game (of which there were at least 4?). And maybe the coin flip isn't actually fair, either?
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 12:49 PM on October 1 [1 favorite]

The framing of the game is esports, and it's that commentary I find insulting because esports aren't idle games, and equating the two is, again, making the same trite comment at the heart of "sportsball".

And to answer your question, no, I don't think you would - especially in the world of competitive PvP games. Players can tell when the game is monkeying around with them, and they don't appreciate it. That's not to say that those games don't have their own dark patterns - they absolutely do - but I don't find what is ultimately an esports skinned idle game to be making any new commentary.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:49 PM on October 1

The production value on this is way over the top for what it is. Kudos.
posted by ckoerner at 1:25 PM on October 1

The framing of the game is esports, and it's that commentary I find insulting because esports aren't idle games, and equating the two is, again, making the same trite comment at the heart of "sportsball".

I think I get where your ick is coming from, but I don't agree that that is the clear intention of the game. The framing of it around esports and matchmaking reads to me less as an attempt to dunk on esports as competitive games (which I agree they very much are, for better and worse) and more an excuse to riff on a whole series of only tangentially related things:

- the legitimate difficulty of making fair-feeling matchmaking work quickly and consistently in an online game with significant skill ranges
- the in turn often unreasonable demands/complaints portions of a playerbase will bring about failure to reach some idealized optimality in matchmaking in practice
- the use of design patterns (of varying darkness!) around the metagame of, especially but not exclusively, live service games to create engagement loops largely unrelated to the quality of the core gameplay in order to increase session time and reduce churn in service of streaming eyeballs and increased revenue
- the wild over-arching horror of capitalism

IMHO the reason the mechanics of the central esport in this reduced to nil is not to make a statement about the notional emptiness of actual competitive games, its to highlight how much framing outside of core gameplay is part of the presentation and game experience used to hook players in. If anything, most of the framing related to esports and live service games seems more intended to be appreciated by existing players of those games than someone coming critically from outside; the metagame mechanics here are fairly lovingly (if cheekily) rendered, the references to genre patterns and tropes well-informed.

Basically, I can see the eau de sportsball vibe being sufficiently offputting to land as just one more trite dismissal if you've been wading through such stuff, so I get the reflex. But I don't think that's what this is doing really at all, and from the time I spent with the demo I think they're doing a delightful job with what they *are* trying to do (which, maddeningly enough, is in part making a really effective goofy metagame around what is, in essence, an autobattler).
posted by cortex at 4:22 PM on October 1 [2 favorites]

i watched someone play this for 30m: looked like some potentially interesting choices around upgrades and builds, but diluted by waiting and grind. density of interesting player decisions too low for my taste.

> accept this joke EULA
the most entertaining joke contract I've seen in a game is the employment contract & employee onboarding process when you start Hardspace: Shipbreaker. Darkly funny stuff.

anyhow, there's a steam sale at the moment, lots of good deals on some excellent older games. i recommend:

• the aforementioned hardspace: shipbreaker (dystopian space tidying up simulator, great soundtrack, 90% positive, discounted 65%)
• subnautica (explore and survive alien underwater ecosystems, 96% positive, discounted 67%)
• terra nil (relaxing optimistic puzzler, restore wastelands into lush ecosystems, 86% positive, discounted 60%)
• nova drift (action roguelike shoot em up, great soundtrack, 96% positive, discounted 45%)
• hades (action roguelike dash and slash, 98% positive, discounted 75%)
• slay the spire (the classic roguelike deckbuilder, 97% positive, discounted 75%)
• monster train (classic roguelike deckbuilder that's secretly tower defence, 96% positive, discounted 90%)

posted by are-coral-made at 5:05 PM on October 1

I picked up Subnautica a couple of weeks ago now that I have a mini PC that can play it, had been playing Monster Train's mobile port, and have been enjoying CloverPit over the last two days. Any game where I can enhance my gambling acumen via utilizing a jar of my own poop is fine by me.

Also picked up Buckshot Roulette, since the reviews on it were stellar and I am a dark human being. I might pick up Placid Plastic Duck Simulator to balance those karmic scales.
posted by delfin at 6:09 PM on October 1

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