Pfftt idk where to start beside saying that I'm genuinely woah by this whole game to describe it the best to me. It's like Kojima took a bite of the apple of ambition and managed to consume it completely. From the time this game was made in it's genuinely the perfect stealth game. The mechanics are so simple but effective it just works really well. Love how the gameplay and storytelling are so well intertwined into the game it's like a perfect in sync dance throughout the whole game it's so impressive how well thought out the game is. The directing how cinematic it feels but not to the point where it's immersion breaking. Funny how a game from the 90s does the whole "video game movie" approach so much more fluid than modern games does which makes it even more impressive. but yea want to say more but after playing a classic not much more can be said. I love Snake , I love the story & message and I love this game Thank You Kojima.


No matter what pain you've suffered, no matter how much trauma life has given you, you are not a slave to fate or anyone else. Fight for what you believe in and choose no matter what to live and when you find something worth fighting for, protect it and carry it with you into the future - that's what it means to be human, that's what it means to be alive.

Yes, it's weird as fuck that I'm giving an idle game a 5* score, especially one that reads so relatively dry compared to many others in the genre. But this game does something that many other idle/incremental games would never dare to do, and it massively succeeds for it: It strips down the Idle Game to the bare metal formulae and numbers that keep the game machine going, and then allows you to try as hard as you can to exploit those formulae and systems and make your numbers go up as fast as possible.

This is where the "exponential" part of the game comes in. As you break the systems and progress through the layers of game by manipulating the coefficients and exponents and variables themselves, the barriers of entry increase exponentially. You consistently find yourself leaping between orders of magnitude to the point that "orders of magnitude" becomes your base unit of measurement and you instead start making order-of-magnitude level leaps between orders of magnitude, and that cycle continues to repeat in perhaps the most numerically satisfying way possible. This game broke my conception of "big numbers" a million times over, and I fucking loved it.

The best part of this game is that it really understands that the core appeal which it offers is in this progression of scale rather than progression of numbers -- an appeal which is, ultimately, true of the vast majority of the genre, but the games rarely seem to be so explicitly aware of it -- and as such, this appeal is capitalized on to the maximum possible level. Every single time you think you've reached the last level of progression, the last layer of numbers going up, the absolute extent of what the scope of this game could possibly be, you cross the threshold into yet another higher layer and realize that the impossibly massive scope which you just mastered was nothing but the beginning of your journey. This kind of recursive shift fits perfectly with the shape of my brain, so to speak, and as such I cannot help but love how well it is executed. You get to shift from manually making second by second choices about how to maximize formulaic growth to automating the ideal growth to automating the automation of the automation of the automation etc. etc. and the layers just continue piling up but never, ever manage to become too heavy or busy for the game to hold its own.

And even better is that the game does not allow itself to decay into just being the same thing on each layer but with different variables -- the typical experience you would expect from an idle game -- but instead, that itself is the first layer of many. At each turn, the way that you play the game and interact with the formulae and numbers (and at times, actual math!) that controls this game continues to change and morph in ways that keep it interesting at all times.

Exponential Idle is a masterclass in the genre of Idle/Incremental games. For several years, I was obsessed with this genre, played all of the big staple names as well as every single indie title I could find on the internet (I still miss the one that let you write Javascript code to automate systems in the game, perhaps the most ingenious twist I have seen in the genre), and without a doubt, this game tops them all. Since finishing my month-long semi-active playthrough nearly a year ago, I have had exactly no temptation to return to any other game in the genre. They may have pretty graphics, nice lore, good design, but they do not grasp the fundamentals of the genre like this game does. If this game went on forever, I would continue traversing each and every level of exponential power scaling for the rest of my life.