You've likely heard of Cookie Clicker as it's the poster child of idle games, and maybe something that you remember playing for a time back when it was relatively new. If you're anything like me, you probably didn't have a very high opinion of it, with it existing more as a meme than an actual video game. But I'm here to tell you that not only is Cookie Clicker not a joke game, it can also get really exciting. I first played Cookie Clicker in 2013 when I was in middle school, within two months of the game releasing, actually. If I remember correctly, the game was sent to me by one of my middle school buddies, who was like an internet wizard to me at the time, due to my very limited internet access growing up. The game was appealing to me, and I would have it open in the background at all times, during my allowed computer time each day. The game was much simpler back then, with none of the mini games implemented, nor seasons, sugar lumps, or heavenly upgrades. It did have the ascension system, but being a dumb, idiot child, like all children are, the idea of losing all my progress by sacrificing all towers, upgrades, and cookies, didn't seem worth almost any reward. If I remember correctly, I got somewhere in the no-nillions of cookies baked total, before eventually getting bored with the game and forgetting about it. Earlier this year, I started compiling a list of every video game I could remember playing for any significant amount of time, and ranking them relative to one another. As a joke, I asked my friend, where I should drink cookie-cooker, on the over 200 entry long list, and she said at the bottom, and then, as a joke, I acted as though it was a great game that deserved respect and loaded up the website and started playing the game for the first time in almost 10 years. In cookie-cooker, you click the big cookie on the screen to generate cookies, which you use to buy towers that generate cookies automatically. With those cookies, you buy more towers, as well as upgrades that further boost your CPS, which is cookies per second. Golden cookies also show up every few minutes, which create an opportunity to produce many more cookies when clicked. To start with the driving factor of the game, simply seeing the rate of cookie production go up from zero to ordinarily massive numbers like 1 billion is surprisingly satisfying. I honestly wouldn't have believed that such a monkey-brained reward would be satisfying to myself now that I'm not a kid anymore, but it surprisingly is, and it underpins the entire game. No amount of explaining this aspect of the game can portray that scene number go up, is legitimately fun to someone who hasn't played an idle game before. So you'll just have to trust me on this one and try it for yourself. Another part of the game that provides some simple joy was seeing the silly new towers and upgrades that you get access to as you collect more cookies. The first two tower types, cursors and grandmas make enough sense. You buy more cursors to click the big cookie for you, just like when you click it with your actual mouse cursor, and grandmas bake cookies. But immediately after those two, things keep getting weirder and weirder. Buy farms to grow cookie plants from cookie seeds, and mines to mine out cookie dough and chocolate chips. The towers keep getting sillier and eventually more abstract as retail thinks of new creative concepts to produce oodles of cookies. The flavor text is also surprisingly clever and sometimes sarcastic when it has no need to be. At the start of the game, when you're growing your CPS at breakneck speeds, you'll often quickly earn enough money to buy several upgrades at once without any downtime in between to read the flavor text of those upgrades, which is a real shame. Some example upgrades with funny text are, ambidextrous. The mouse and cursor are twice as efficient. Look ma, both hands. Septilian fingers. Curcery flavor text. Cheap pose. Rake in the dough. Frosted sugar cookies. Maybe more styled and substance, depending on the recipe. Nothing that hides itself under this much frosting should be trusted. The text in the news headlines, as well as some upgrades, often have entertaining details of what the world is like after you start producing unimaginable quantities of cookies. Key clicker does a lot of these little things right, such as presentation, theming, funny text, milestones, and artwork. The new mechanics that were added to the game, since the first time I played it, give the game a surprisingly significant level of depth that greatly extends the amount of time that cookie-maxing will be enjoyable. Heavenly upgrades are upgrades available in the game that cannot be purchased with regular cookies. You need heavenly chips to buy these upgrades, which you start earning after baking one trillion cookies. After which point an increasing number of cookies is required to earn each successive heavenly chip. Once you have enough heavenly chips to buy some upgrades, you need to ascend to actually spend them. As previously stated, ascending causes you to lose all towers and upgrades you've purchased, but all heavenly chips that you've earned will grant an additive plus 1% CPS bonus to your cookie production on all future runs. When the heavenly upgrades that you purchase with heavenly chips often have exciting and unique effects that will permanently affect your bakery across all future runs. Some of the most transformative of these upgrades are the upgrades that allow you to force a seasonal bonus to be active outside of that seasonal date, unlocking the cookie dragon pet that has a whole set of unlockable bonuses on its own, and upgrades that boost manual clicking effectiveness. The heavenly upgrades are purchased via a skill tree, only accessible immediately after ascending, and are great rewards that make baking more cookies to enable their purchase exciting. Once you've baked 1 billion cookies, you start automatically growing sugar lumps, which each take about 24 hours to grow, and can be spent to increase the cookie production on individual towers. However, when upgrading specifically the farm, bank, temple, or wizard towers, you unlock new tools to bake cookies faster. For example, when upgrading the farm, you unlock a crop growing mini-game where you grow and crossbreed different plants, each of which have different effects on your cookie production while growing. There's a surprising breadth of effects that the different crops provide, allowing for some fun theory crafting of ways to cookie max. And that's the strength of all these unlockable mini-games, as they're called. They allow you to puzzle together what the combinations of effects are at your disposal that will help you make the most cookies the fastest. The strategies that I came up with also changed over time, as I transitioned between early, mid, and late game cookie clicker. I also avoided looking up optimal mini-game strategies online while playing the game, because crafting those strategies on my own and discovering new optimizations was a major source of enjoyment from the game for me. I've purposely refrained from explaining the most optimal strategies available within and between all of these systems to allow you to think of strategies on your own. As I've previously said, that was one of my favorite parts of the game. But rest assured, it's neat how nearly all the systems can interact with one another to create synergistic results. At the time that I'm writing this script, I've been on my cookie clicker save for 188 days. I played much more actively in the first 40 or so days of that before my drive to cookie max slowly milled out. Right now I leave the game open whenever I'm on my computer, and it's often the front window on my second monitor. I don't even click every golden cookie I see anymore though. Sometimes I'd rather continue playing whatever game I'm playing, rather than interrupt it, clicking out of the window, even just for a second. This late into the game, golden cookies are essentially the only way to make any progress. Optimizing as many things as possible to maximize CPS is still valuable, but only because it also increases gains from golden cookies. Because of this, I've eventually come to accept some actions that I previously considered cheating. The game enables the manipulation of its own systems if you're willing to abuse them, which I honestly think is a great decision from the developer. This allows people to speed things up if they would have otherwise lost interest in the game, as progress slows to a crawl. Even with the abuse of some of these mechanics though, it sometimes takes weeks or even a month to make a significant increase to my CPS. I've been sticking with this game a lot longer than I expected I would. Like I said, I originally started playing this game as a joke. In my 188 days, I've unlocked 98% of the upgrades, 95% of the achievements, 50% of the shadow achievements, and 100% of the heavenly upgrades. I'd really like to be able to get every single achievement in upgrade just to be able to say I completed the game, but to be honest, I don't think the juices worth the squeeze. I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of the game, to my surprise, as idle games seemed like something that I wouldn't enjoy at all. But there isn't much left of the game that I haven't done a hundred times already, so I expect that my cookie empire will one day quietly close before I reach 100% completion. Much to the surprise of my former self, I would recommend this game to everyone. It's free, so there's no loss in trying it, and I think that the simple pleasure of watching Number Go Up is exciting enough in the beginning for anyone to get some enjoyment out of this game. My only admonishment for starting your own playthrough is to not expect to get things 100% completed. Just enjoy the content while it lasts.