If you didn’t think I need more exciting hobbies before this post, you’re going to rethink that opinion by the end of this post. Welcome to my world. This is the perfect game for a fearful gamer.
My latest Steam game obsession is called simply Cookie Clicker, and, well, the gist is to make cookies. Lots of them. Like, an insane amount of cookies. Quantity is everything in this game. Let me explain…
At first the only way you can make cookies is by clicking the big cookie on the left side of your game screen. One click = one cookie. Yay you! You made a cookie! That’s the Cursor element since you simply use your cursor/mouse to manually make each cookie. But you’ll never get anywhere if that’s the only way you bake cookies. Click click click click click click… after a thousand of those clicks, I was about ready to quit in frustration.
But wait! Once you’ve hit a certain number of cookies, you can use them to hire a Grandma or two to help you make cookies. This, of course, means you can bake the cookies faster. So now it turns into a sort of weird, low-level math game: The goal is to bake as many cookies as possible, but you’ll need to then hand those cookies back to purchase machinery and factories to make cookies faster. I’ll admit that I’m decently far into the game, and I still hate seeing my cookie total plummet when I purchase a bigger, better apparatus to help me make more cookies. Gotta spend cookies to make cookies, as the saying (sort of) goes.
There are 637 Steam achievements in this game (egad!), and I have only 46 so far. I have managed to bake nearly 500 trillion cookies (with the aid of everything from 25 Grandmas to a Wizard tower, an Alchemy lab, a Time machine, and an Antimatter condenser. Each of these items can bake a lot more cookies per second, but each one costs a lot more than the previous ones. A lot more. If, for example, you want a second Antimatter condenser to speed up production… well, it’s gonna cost you a lot more than that first one did. The price inflation in this game is depressing. Watch your cookie count plummet as you opt for that second one…
The good news is that each increasingly expensive machine can bake WAY more cookies. (Those Antimatter condensers can whip out 430 million cookies per second!)
I just bought my second Antimatter condenser (which cost me nearly 200 trillion cookies), and my cookie bank is slowly climbing back up so I can buy the next expensive machine. I don’t even know what it’s called yet, or how many cookies per second it can bake, but I do know that the first one I buy will cost me 2.1 quadrillion cookies.
And after that last Antimatter condenser purchase, my total available cookies are back down to 66 trillion cookies in my bank. So, I learned within the first day or so to leave the game running in the background 24/7, since most of the cookie production is automatic at this point as I work my way up to that 2.1 quadrillion cookie purchase.
I now leave the game running on my second monitor as I work throughout the day and even overnight as I sleep. Time is money, or time is cookies.
Cookie production is not entirely a passive enterprise, though. Every few minutes a rogue cookie goes flying across the screen, and if you click on it, you get some sort of random bonus of cookies. I’ve trained my peripheral vision to catch the rogue cookies most of the time while I’m at my desk, so that’s helped my cookie bank increase a little faster.
Of course, with a game running in the background 24/7 for days and weeks, your total gameplay time quickly gets insane. I’m hovering just under 1,000 hours of playtime (in the two months I’ve owned this game), although I’d say 80% of that is passive playing.
Still, the next machine AFTER the one I’m currently saving for will cost me 26 quadrillion cookies. It pains me to even think about that many cookies, that much game time.
And I’m not even up to one-tenth of the possible Steam achievements. I can barely handle all this excitement.
