Realm Grinder

Realm Grinder is what got me to love Idle Games/Incremental Games, and is so far the only game in that genre that I have actually "replayed". That's insane considering these games take weeks, sometimes months (or years!) to reach the end of their content. I genuinely believe that if you are a developer who wants to make a game of this genre, you should play this game as research on how to make a long-term experience remain interesting and compelling.

Tempo is the main thing keeping this game as strong as it is. Realm Grinder always seems to know when to give you a new upgrade type or switch-up in the meta to keep things interesting. You play as different factions that you have to ally with until you abdicate (which is the traditional incremental game mechanic of "delete all your progress to get a new type of currency), and the balance of what factions are good and what are bad changes throughout your overall playtime depending on how far you are. Each faction also plays differently, such as Elves focusing on clicking a lot and Undead focusing on closing the game entirely and not actually playing it! Things start out relatively fast and start to slow down near the end, but I never felt like the pacing was unbearably slow or so fast I didn't have time to experiment with certain mechanics. I feel like the depth can sometimes become too overwhelming though- at certain points I used guides to see what options were the best, since I didn't want to look at a giant tech tree and determine which upgrades were tenths of percent better than others. But if that's your thing, more power to you... there's a lot of that at certain points!

Common complaints I see of Realm Grinder are that the balancing that happens every so often makes people have to "re-learn" how to play the game since it's so drastic, and that the super lategame is fairly stagnant and long. Personally, the point of the game that both of these points apply to are nearly a year into the game, and while it can feel deflating at times to get that far and have a bump in the road throw things off, the content all the way there is stellar and feels satisfying. I don't think people saying these things are invalidated as both points are fairly true as a long time player, however I don't think that affects my review score personally since it's so far into the game that it only takes up a minor portion of my total playtime.

If you want to play one "Idle Game" or "Incremental Game" to see what the hubbub is about, this is the one to play. There is gameplay here for you whether you like the active style gameplay with clicking and spell casting, or the idle style where you come home from work and see how far you've gotten.