Your Guilty Pleasure Game

I have a particular love of Idle Games, there are quite a few that I could include on this list but chose not to. My first idle game that I ever played was Leaf Blower Revolution, the entire premise is that you start with a green screen representing a field, leaves spawn, and you push them off the screen by moving your mouse cursor, and that's it.

So obviously that's not the entire game. At first each leaf is counted as 1 leaf and as you push them off the screen your leaf counter goes up. The more you accumulate, eventually a leaf shop opens where you can spend those leaves to buy upgrades which speed up the process. You eventually unlock tools, more powerful leaf blowers, and the value of leaves increases, and eventually you unlock new types of leaves. The iteration goes from there and builds in complexity, from new areas, new collectibles, new powers and abilities unlock over time to create a game that is more about resource management and allocation than collecting leaves.

For most people familiar with the concept of an Idle Game the one they probably played first is Cookie Clicker which arguably created the genre; that's a game I did eventually play and got equally obsessed with but that one requires you to click a cookie as its main gameplay mechanic - something which lead me to break several mice over the years wearing out their clicking function. I am aware that you can use auto-clickers (external programs that automatically click the mouse for you) but I never liked using those because it always felt like cheating when I did, and if I had to resort to that then there wasn't much point playing.

Leaf Blower Revolution currently stands as the game where I have the most hours in gameplay time racked up in my Steam Library, at 3,439.4 hours to date - the total time is quite misleading though as the name of the genre suggests these Idle Games often have an element of idle play, where you leave the game running and don't do anything - in the case of Leaf Blower Revolution this is because of an in-game upgrade called an Automated Leaf Blower which will collect leaves for you. This ended up being a game that I would often run in the background on my PC whilst I watched a movie or listened to music and doom-scrolled through social media; in the early stages of gameplay I often set the game up in the morning and left it running when I went to work.

If you've played one idle game you've pretty much played them all, bar the changes in the story and setting, they pretty much all involve the same gameplay loop involving some repetitive action over time, upgrades, tiers, prestige, ascension, and the occasional mini-game to break up the monotony during active play. The reason they're all a guilty pleasure, Leaf Blower Revolution in particular, is because they all give the illusion of progression but are all pretty much endless, apart from unlocking every achievement it's not usually possible to actually "complete" these games which does make some people ask what the point is, but then again there are many games of other genres you could ask the same for, one or two might be mentioned during this challenge.