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.
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.