The Platonic idle game (as in Platonic ideal? Ideal/idle? No? Oh well). I'm concerningly receptable to idle games. They are concentrated, gaming dopamine; numbers junk food. You click buttons, watch numbers go up, till they stop increasing quite so quickly and start over, watching those earlier stages race by faster and faster. Idle games deliver the satisfaction of getting really good at a skill and returning to a basic project to find it's so much easier than when you first attempted it, but you don't invest anything other than time into them. You wait, watch, click occasionally and pleasure is mainlined into your brain veins.

It's because of this that I swear them off, particularly on mobile. One can only beat Adventure Capitalist (and communist) so many times before recognising you have a problem. I'll install one just to play on the toilet, and the next thing I know I'm cancelling plans, watching ads and not even really having fun. They provide compulsion rather than true enjoyment. So I only tried (the) Gnorp Apologue after learning it had an ending, one that is achieved in a sensible amount of time too, and I'm quite glad I did.

There's not much to be said or analysed here. Gnorp feels almost like a toybox idle game, one that encourages creativity and lateral thinking, an almost roguelike mentality towards finding combos and cohesive builds. Getting to the ending is more like a tutorial for the true mode, where you speedrun the game and beat it as quickly as possible with the best setup you can devise. A min-maxer's wet dream, but I was more than satisfied with seeing the game play till the credits. Is it doing anything particularly new? Not really. Is it the deepst idle or management game? Definitely not. But Gnorp is cute and satisfying, a game that stays precisely as long as it could do then leaves you with fond memories of enormous swarms of neon particles. If you enjoy zoning out while watching waltzing hordes of missiles dance across your screen, then I highly recommend Gnorp to you.

I felt less guilty playing through this game than other idle games, mostly because of the solid ending to work towards. Gnorp doesn't manage to fix the issues with the genre, the game still feels like empty calories. It also felt very linear towards the end, the game could have used a few more upgrade options and it's easy for a new player to get stuck on a run by improperly balancing DPS/collecting. The lack of depth is forgivable with the game's "reasonable" runtime. The humor sucks, but not in an obnoxious way.

I'll probably forget I played this in a year, but it made a work shift go by pretty quickly, that's worth a 3/5.

was dreamin' of gnorp strategies until i finished the game

still dreamin' of gnorp strategies after finishing the game

only you will know if an idler with build/progression and literal showers of currency is good for your brain

absolutely obsessed until it was completed, and even then, hitting 'S' sees the game become your desktop background, which is lovely and means it's still on long after 'completion'

really cool to run on an ultrawide monitor

some perks and abilities are neat in principle but aren't quite balanced enough to be worthwhile

bravo; braw wee background game

It's fair to say that (the) Gnorp Apolgue sets itself apart from your run-of-the-mill incremental game. All the basics are there; click rock, collect shards, buy things with shards to better help you click and collect. What makes it so unique is how these incremental gains interact with each other, and how much planning and managing is needed to successfully complete it. Players can and will need to evaluate their strategy, lest their production line fall behind.

Where many incremental games have you prestige for the sheer sake of making numbers rise quicker, (the) Gnorp Apologue requires it. Rate of excess shard production needs to increase to move along compression tiers, but rate of collection is what allows for buying units, housing and other upgrades. In fact, increasing collection rate is precisely what unlocks talent points, which can be spent on subsequent runs for passive bonuses that make getting to higher tiers more manageable. It's a balancing act, and a surprisingly engaging one at that.

Visuals are simplistic, but suit the game very well. Hardcore fans of incremental games no longer need to turn to UI-only games for their best-of recommendations, though the UI itself leaves a little to be desired. Tooltips for damage and collection rates of individual units would be nice, as it takes a while to learn what each symbol represents, and early portions of runs can be ruined by trying to buy units too fast, resulting in buying unneeded upgrades at best, and build-ruining ones at worst.

The builds are by far the most interesting aspect of (the) Gnorp Apologue. Planning ahead pays off, yet looking through Steam discussion posts point towards there being a wide variety of strategies that work. Experimentation is encouraged - wonderfully so - though it could turn some players away when they realize the build they've invested an hour or so into just isn't going to cut it.

(the) Gnorp Apologue, with its clear goal but many paths to victory, as well as its intertwined and engaging systems serves as not only a great introduction to incremental games, but cements it as one of the finest. It's rock solid.

A simple cute idle game that doesn't waste your time. I'm more familiar with unending exponential idle games like Cookie Clicker which literally never end, and Gnorp keeps things achievable, concise, and doesn't out-stay its welcome.

The game is built around attacking a rock to generate shards and collecting those shards to spend on resources. The pile in the middle grows and if it builds beyond a threshold you go up one tier, the number of shards is halved but their value is doubled. With 10 tiers this makes the task of balancing your damage vs. collection the key to growing your supplies.

The units available are a cute and quirky mix that I won't spoil, but beyond the variety of unlockable structures and ways to affect damage/collection, there's also the traits. By reaching collection rate thresholds you earn special points that can be used on a skill tree of sorts that applies gameplay modifiers. These are key to winning the game so expect at least 3-4 runs and can make the strategy of how you win different - albeit not wildly so.

Overall the graphics are simple, the music is serviceable, and gameplay is enjoyable. In the 2 days I 100%'d it I saw just about everything it had to offer and was ready to stop anyways. There is replayability if you want to experiment with units and the skills but I don't think there's much motivation to. Good for people testing the waters of idle games, but lacking length and breadth for hardcore fans of the genre.

I have a love/hate relationship with idle games, and the hate portion can be summed up with my ardent belief that the creator of NGU Idle shouldn't be allowed near a computer ever again. The ideal idle experience for me is one that takes the purity of manipulating numbers that all other genres obfuscate and mashes it with engaging upgrades, strategy, and an endearing concept. First and foremost, Gnorp Apologue is on the good side of incremental gaming. It has a very simplistic art style, with your little hardworking gnorps being like 6x5 pixels, but it's fun and satisfying to see those busybodies busybodying around, doing your bidding. Certain upgrades and gnorp professions have synergies which keep you strategizing and not just blindly clicking upgrades, but at the same time it's relatively forgiving; at worst, a bad strategy will have you waste some time.

Here we come to the elephant in the room: does this game respect your time? Yes and no. I truly believe the ideal idle game not only possesses the qualities I listed above, but can also be completed within less than a day of play. All idle games I've played that pass this time limit I find are extending their length beyond what interesting content they have. Prestiging is a basic concept of the genre, but so many have you go through an hours long cycle to make a tiny upgrade, and then you do it all again. Repeat for weeks of your life. Gnorp Apologue is definitely better than most at this - I still felt that I was experimenting and learning new things with each cycle even if all I got for my troubles was one or two more prestige points - but it's undoubtable that the rate of new content thrown at you lowers dramatically after the first few hours.

Here we come to the elephant within the elephant within the room (the first one was hungry): you have to pay for this game to play it. I think this game is worth the money, but all paid incremental games hit this wall. A game about manipulating numbers can only have so many systems and layers until it becomes ungodly complicated and/or require an unworthy amount of dev time. So the rate at which this content is introduced inevitably slows down at a certain point of complexity until you've prestiged enough times to beat it. It took me just over 17 hours (with a fair amount of idling) to do so. I believe if the numbers were fudged so that it took more like 10 hours instead, it would be a more consistently engaging experience. But I don't regret any time I spent with this game. After finishing, I went back to get some more prestige points to see the endgame of my overarching strategy, then got the rest of the achievements, which I don't do that regularly. So overall it won't change your opinion on idle games but, if your views on them align with mine, I think you'll get your money's worth. End of review. Nothing else to say. Nope.




gnorp

This is probably the first incremental game that pretty heavily incentivises the concept of "builds". Builds are essentially a requirement since the upgrade currency is limited every run and each run you can choose to focus on a certain upgrade path for a certain set of tools which changes how you approach bashing the rock... until you get rockets which hilariously trivialises every other build

For what it is, it's a really fun, well constructed incremental game with a definitive end but has some balance issues. I think I would keep checking back in on this now and then to see how it's shaped up

Although I'm not very well versed in the genre, (the) Gnorp Apologue is a cute lil' idle/incremental game with a surprisingly extense layer of stategy with a lot of visual flair to it, and unlike others it actually has an end goal that's attainable for the casual player and, overall, is a fun time.

As you're tasked with leading your Gnorp creatures with putting shards from the jelly-bean looking rock into resources to use for different buildings, housing to recruit more Gnorps or weapons and utilities to hit the rock even harder in order to cause a Compression Event, you notice how there's a lot of ways to go about it if you prioritize certain units over others. It's a pretty fun time waster, and also sorta challenging in the endgame to figure things out. And that is probably its biggest hold back, it can get tedious to do stuff near the end due to how slow progression gets at that point, but if you're nearing the end you most likely already have a pretty extense knowledge of your buildings, units and prestige upgrades, so in all it becomes a pretty satisfying experience to finish.

A pretty neat surprise to close off 2023.

One of the finer incremental games you can play, as it emphasized quality over quantity. Visually appealing as you get to actually see the gnorps move around and do the things you assign them to do, instead of just numbers going up or unmoving sprites. The real appeal of this game is the approaches that are available as you work through the skill tree. The Gnorp Apologue encourages experimentation and strategizing how to effectively damage that rock and collect those shards. Endgame gets busy but it's fun to watch.

Easily completed within a week, and the best part is you can always go back to get achievements and try a new "build". The Gnorp is your oyster!