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.

What if Balatro was a cookie clicker card battler? Well, this, it seems.

Like Balatro, you have a deck of cards that – over time – you can modify to add or remove cards, and have special cards that add extra points or multipliers to hands you play. Unlike Balatro, hands played are automatic – you just click the deck and a hand is dealt. Quickly, you get the ability to autodeal hands on a timer, just like in cookie clicker games.

As you score points based on poker hands played, you spend those points on upgrades, like more decks, cards, multipliers for different hand types, and so on. Eventually you get loads of decks running at the same time, with seven cards in a dealt, and extra poker hands like five of a kind or a 7 card straight. Numbers go up, you get bonuses for “resetting” the game and permanent upgrades that persist (and can only be obtained by) resets. Just like any number of “modern” incremental clicker type games.

Only, there’s more. Because the plot is that Jester, the clown on the artwork, has actually trapped you and you have to make money to pay for your release. Naturally, he reneges this deal and you have to actually fight him. It’s here the card battling, albeit automated, comes into play.

It’s a surprisingly deep, and short (which works in its favour), game of the genre. It’s a bit fiddly to play on the Steam Deck because some of the text is impossible to read even when zoomed in, but luckily there’s nothing that important you miss. If the devs could just scale everything up a bit for the Deck, it would be amazing.