Game Reviews -- 2025

01/12/2026 -- Cookie Clicker

Price: Varies

Platform: Windows, Mac, PS, Xbox, Switch, Android

You start off clicking a picture to bake cookies. One by one. Then, you get help, hire on a nice grandma or two to bake more -- and you're on your way to baking more cookies than there are atoms in the universe.

This is Cookie Clicker, a popular idle game you can grasp in moments but spend thousands of hours optimizing. It combines (mostly) intuitive mechanics with hundreds of achievements and multiple levels of metaprogression to hook you in, and stays charming with fun flavor text and a good sense of humor about itself.

Like most idle games, the initial setup is simple: click cookie to get cookies to spend on getting more cookies faster. Your initial purchasables come in the form of buildings, the cookie-generators, and upgrades, which do things like increase the efficiency of your buildings or give you a flat upgrade on cookie generation. As you progress, you'll eventually find that your cookie output stops scaling as fast as the cost of new things.

This leads to one layer of metaprogression, the ascension mechanic common in incremental games. You forfeit all your cookies in exchange for a number of prestige levels, which you can spend on permanent upgrades and which boost your cookie output in subsequent runs, thus giving you a way to meet the increased demands of higher-tier buildings and upgrades.

But that's not all. You also unlock a special set of upgrades that scale your production based on how many of the game's 622 achievements you've attained, adding another layer of progression. And you also have sugar lumps, a currency which accumulates in real-time, and which you can spend to unlock minigames and more.

The above, combined with a presentation with just enough juice, art and flavor text makes Cookie Clicker possibly the ultimate dopamine simulator. Every unlock, every achievement, every new run gives you a sense of accomplishment and progress. Whether you choose to play actively or keep the game in the background in true idle fashion, you'll feel like you're constantly moving forward.

At least at first. As of this writing, I've gotten roughly half the game's achievements and unlockables, which have flowed in steadily throughout my time playing. However, I understand that some of the endgame achievements are thousand-hour commitments. This is not a game you can expect to 100% in a week or two.

Still, while the game does scale up in complexity, I've found it's still pretty approachable for a novice to idle games like myself. I did look at some guides, but I didn't feel like I was wasting my time by not playing perfectly optimally. The game feels forgiving enough that it still allows me to make tangible leaps on each run. And it has room to adjust my playstyle from active to idle as I wish.

While I doubt I'll ever reach the true endgame, I've still very much enjoyed my time with Cookie Clicker. It's fun to the point of addiction and a great example of how deceptively engaging idle games can be. I heartily recommend it, with one caveat:

That being that Cookie Clicker is actually a horror game. I accept that I might be living under a rock, but I did not know this going in (should have paid more attention to the Steam tags). The horror themes are subtle at first, but become overt after you trigger a certain event. The game will warn you before you do this, and there is an option in the settings to turn off the grosser imagery. However, if you're particularly squeamish around body horror, I'd still say probably skip this one, since a lot of the discussions and pictures around the game will likely feature the disturbing themes.

Cookie doesn't look like a word any more.