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See, Idle Slayer? This is how you make an interaction-necessary incremental clicker type game. It doesn’t outstay its welcome, you make constant progress, and (after a certain point) you don’t need to touch anything most of the time.

In Timber Rush, you are a lumberjack. You chop down trees, wear high heels, suspenders and uh, make lots of money. On Wednesdays you also go shopping, probably. Chopping wood nets you money, and money can be spent on better axes, helpers, and other upgrades to get more money faster. Soon enough, you’ll have thousands of logs flying everywhere, automatically collected and turned into cash.

Unlike other clicker games, you have a limited amount of “chopping time”, so each “run” is only a few minutes during which you try to improve your chopping skills on the fly, much like you would in something like Vampire Survivors. You gain XP, and each level you get to choose a random upgrade that only applies to that run, like a multiplier or a speed increase or a higher chance of getting two logs for a single chop. Get the right combinations of these upgrades (like an increased chance of doing critical damage, and an increase in the amount of critical damage) and you can get a huge payout. After your run, you get buy permanent upgrades and skills.

There’s not a lot of depth, but playing with upgrade combos is fun and seeing numbers go up, especially exponentially, is always satisfying. However, there is a suggestion on the Steam forums that pretty much the whole game is AI generated. I don’t know if that’s actually the case, but you might want to check that out before you buy it.

The title of this game is a bit of a lie. It implies it’s one of those cookie clicker type idler games where you kill things, but actually, there’s a lot of non-idle “gameplay” needed in order to actually progress.

The basic idea is you run left to right, automatically, and collect coins and kill baddies. Coins let you buy upgrades for your equipment which basically act as coins-per-second increases and multipliers, meaning more coins more quickly with which to buy more stuff to repeat the cycle with ever-increasing numbers going up.

So, it’s same as most of games like this. However, there’s a second currency – souls – which can only be earned by resetting all your progress. You collect them mainly from slaying foes, but can’t actually use them until you wipe out all your upgrades, coins and equipment and start again. The souls can then be spent on permanent upgrades and unlockables. This too I’ve seen in other games and is sometimes called “prestiging”. Later, there’s also a third type of currency which you can sort of “super prestige” with, which also wipes out your permanent upgrades but lets you buy other properly permanent upgrades. Oh, and there’s a gem currency which you can buy various thing with but requires Real Actual Money, so I never touched it.

The “idle” bit which isn’t though, is the auto-runner stuff. Sure, you can just leave the game running (or even not running, and coins and souls rack up when you’re not playing), but there are missions and requirements where you need to interact. Like, boost so many times, or collect boxes that require you to jump, or enter and complete bonus levels which are tricky (the first few times, but not when you’ve done them over 200 times) platforming timed-jump challenges with big money rewards. If you don’t do these hands-on bits, you progress much, much less quickly. And, since this game is months long (yes, I’ve been playing it for months, off and on) you have to take part or it’ll be years.

In terms of completing it, I bought everything. All upgrades, all items, all unlocks. There’s no “congraturation you sucsess” and there’s no credit roll, but I literally ran out of things to do, so as far as I’m concerned, I’m done. Should you play it? No. It might be free but it’s stupid and too time consuming and there are a few bits in your progress where it takes too long between improvements. Like, when you first hit Billions of coins, it takes hours to accumulate them and reach the next milestone. Same when you get to Octillions. But you skip over Trillions so fast you barely notice they exist. There’s a bit of a pacing issue, and I can’t help feel it’s intentional to get you to cave and spend Real Actual Money to skip these slow bits. I think I’d have prefered to pay a bit for the game and not have to deal with Crawl or Pay.

I do like Rusty Lake’s weird little point and click adventure games. What I hadn’t realised, is that I had this game, unplayed, in my library. Or that it even existed. I saw an article about it and looked it up on Steam and lo – I already had it. It’s also free, just in case you haven’t.

It’s actually a meta game, being set in the Rusty Lake offices as they prepare for a company birthday celebration (which, cyclically, this game was released to celebrate), but it starts as you playing the Mr Rabbit game within the game, where you help said bunny perform various magic tricks, mostly by clicking on things in the right order or spotting patterns. These tricks do get a bit… weird.

After a while you “break out” of the game and have some tasks to perform in the studio offices, and this bit plays out like, and references many of, the other Rusty Lake games. Unhinged dark macabre humour included. Those wacky Dutch, eh? Must be something in the water. Or the brownies.

It’s short, has a few clever bits and is well worth playing, especially if you’ve played others by the studio.