Universal Paperclips is the iOS version of a classic browser based game where you start manually making some paperclips and idle your way into transforming the whole universe into paperclips; A few systems are added on top of each other, like the stock market, quantum computing and game simulations, all to feed into your paperclip making. Ultimately, the balance on mobile didn’t work well for me, and at some point progress became excruciatingly slow, so I stopped.
The game starts fairly simply; you click a button and make paperclips and you can control how much they sell for. Changing the price changes the public demand, so you’ll have to find the sweet spot where you consistently sell your paperclips at the maximum price. To make clips, you need wire that you have to buy, and after a while you unlock “auto-clippers” that make paperclips for you. Then you get computing power to research upgrades, investments and strategic modeling to get “yomi”. Everything pools into the same goal: Make more paperclips. You need to money to improve your auto-clippers and you unlock more computing power as you get more paperclips.
The game fell apart for me when I had all upgrades I could purchase except one that used a lot of computing power, but I couldn’t get that computing power because I needed much, much more paperclips produced. I was getting a good trickle of money, but not enough to buy all the auto-clippers that were required, and there was nothing to manually do to make things go faster. The only real action I had was to “make one paperclip”, which was equivalent to do nothing. So I stopped there.
I’m not sure if my experience with Universal Paperclips was bad only because of poor strategy on my end (you can choose whether you put your computing power into max capacity or production per second, and this was my bottleneck), but it is still a strange thing for an idle game to put you into a situation where you can’t really progress and should actually do a hard reset. Universal Paperclips scratched my curiosity a bit, but it ultimately fell flat.
