Journey to Incrementalia is a really neat looking and pretty fun idle game where you click to gain mana, destroy walls, gain skill points, purchase spells, summon creatures, complete quests and try to destroy all the hundred walls. I was pretty engrossed by the game at first, but after a bit it became a pure numbers game that I didn’t really enjoy at all.
The early phases of the game are really fun. You click (or hold) an orb to get mana, which is then used to buy upgrades, like improving your mana generation, summoning souls (that you can use to make creatures to attack the walls), and more. By beating down the walls, you get skill points and unlock new tiers of skills, and the list is fairly impressive. There are new summons to get, spells that you manually can cast, improvements to other abilities, effects that clearly synergize together, so you start thinking about potential builds for your army fairly quickly.
By completing quests (which are usually just occasions to spend mana and then wait for some time) you get other rewards, like items you can equip, which can also change the way you interact with the game’s mechanics. Maybe your mana regenerates really fast, maybe you get a damage multiplier based on the number of X or Y summon you have, so you can diversify your builds further that way. This is needed because the walls start becoming damage “checks” fairly quickly, they regenerate or kill your summons, so you have to overcome this.
At some point, one thing started bothering me; you get new skills way faster than you get skill points, and it feels constrictive because skills usually have a maximum cap of 20, but you also get new skills that seem to synergize well with what you already have, so you can’t mix and match too much. Maybe there’s a sweet spot and you don’t need maximum levels in everything, but this brings me to my second issue, after a while it seems like if you’re not “good” at the numbers, you just will stop progressing and it feels like the number of viable options you have gets smaller (and not larger). Maybe it’s as straightforward as your x2 mana regen item being much worse than the x15 damage one, but maybe your poison build just stops working at around wall 35 and you need to switch to skeleton bombers or what not.
This is not to say that the game shouldn’t have any challenge at all, but for me, when I got to that point, I realized that someone could just write a guide explaining exactly what the “correct” build at any situation is, and they mathematically would be right. This wasn’t a big issue when I still progressed (albeit slowly) but when I just couldn’t damage the wall at all, it got really frustrating. This made me feel like I couldn’t really go with my original plan and go very slowly, I had to figure out which multiplier added to what other multiplier made the damage number really big.
And that’s not really what I enjoy in these games, so that’s the point at which I stopped. Journey to Incrementalia is really stylish and the mechanics are neat, so if you like idle/incremental games I’d give it a shot, but you might need to be more flexible than I was with your expectations and objectives to get to the end of things!
