Clicker Age

Clicker Age is a fantasy-themed clicker simulation game where players act as a ruler battling against hordes of mysterious creatures. By strategically buying various units and improvements, players can enhance their abilities to progress through endless game worlds, all featuring a beautiful visual style, dynamic music, and high difficulty.

Clicker Age: A Chronically Flawed Artifact of the Idle Genre’s Mainstream Moment

Introduction: The Unlikely Sovereign

In the vast, often-derided landscape of “clicker” or “incremental” games, titles are frequently judged by their crude humor, elementary aesthetics, and minimalist design. Clicker Age, released on January 13, 2020, by the obscure duo of developer GoodMood and publisher Astero, enters this arena not with a satirical wink like Cow Clicker, nor with the brutalist efficiency of Doomsday Clicker, but with a stated ambition for “beautiful visual style” and “dynamic music.” It presents itself as a “classic clicker” wearing the fantasy robes of a ruler battling “hordes of amazing and mysterious creatures.” Yet, a deep dive into its historical context, mechanical execution, and community reception reveals a game that is less a crowned masterpiece of the genre and more a telling case study in ambition strangled by technical negligence. This review argues that Clicker Age’s primary legacy is not its gameplay innovations, but its stark demonstration of how poor development practices can irrevocably tarnish even the most aesthetically earnest of idle games, rendering it a cautionary tale rather than a celebrated relic.

Development History & Context: An Opaque Genesis

The studio “GoodMood” and its publisher “Astero” are entities with vanishingly small digital footprints. There are no developer blogs, no postmortems, no interviews illuminating the creative vision behind Clicker Age. This opacity is common for micro-studios operating on Steam’s low barrier to entry, but it leaves a critical void. We can only infer from the final product and its metadata.

The game emerged in January 2020, a period of saturation for the clicker genre. The foundational satire of Cow Clicker (2010) had long since ossified into a legitimate, popular subgenre with titles like Realm Grinder (2015) and Clicker Heroes (2014) offering deeper, more engaging systems. Clicker Age’s positioning as a “Simulation” (per MobyGames) with “Action,” “Adventure,” and “Strategy” tags (per Steam/IGDB) reflects this genre-blending trend, attempting to marry the idle core with RPG-lite progression. Its perspective—”3rd-person (Other)” with a “Fixed / flip-screen” visual style—suggests a deliberate, retro-inspired aesthetic choice, possibly aiming for the charm of 90s isometric RPGs or classic fantasy strategy games. The “point and select” interface aligns perfectly with clicker mechanics.

Technologically, the game’s requirement of a “DualCore Cpu” and a staggering “2000 GB RAM” listing on Steam is a glaring red flag—a likely copy-paste error or absurd placeholder that immediately signals amateurish production values. The game occupies a mere 25 MB of space, consistent with a 2D asset-based clicker, but the community-discovered fact that it shares an executable and save file location with another game, ClickMonster, exposes a catastrophic lack of isolation in its file management—a fundamental failure in development hygiene.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive: The Emperor’s New Story

Clicker Age offers no traditional narrative. The Steam store blurb posits a fantasy premise: “you act as a kind of ruler who fights with hordes of amazing and mysterious creatures.” This is not a story but a ludic setup—a thematic veneer for the core clicker loop. There are no named characters, no dialogue, no plot progression. The “worlds” referenced in the description (“further advance on endless game worlds”) are abstract progression tiers (World 1, World 2, etc.), not explorable spaces with lore.

Thematically, the game gestures at the classic fantasy trope of the sovereign defending their realm, but it is utterly hollow. The “monsters” are not creatures with bestiary entries or lore; they are generic, unnamed enemy units purchased and deployed. The “theme” is pure aesthetic dressing. The player’s “rule” is exercised not through diplomacy, strategy, or narrative choice, but through the monotonous accumulation of resources (likely gold or “souls” implied by the genre) to buy more automated “units.” The contradiction is profound: a game about becoming a powerful ruler that reduces governance to watching numbers go up and clicking. It embodies the genre’s inherent critique of late-stage capitalism—the endless, meaningless grind for growth—but without the self-awareness or satirical punch of its predecessors. It is the fantasy of power without the substance of power.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems: A House of Cards

The core gameplay loop is standard clicker fare: click to generate a base resource (presumably gold), use that resource to purchase units that generate resources automatically, purchase upgrades to increase the effectiveness of clicks or units, and repeat to progress to higher tiers (Worlds) where enemies are tougher and resources scale exponentially.

The “High Difficulty” Enigma: The store proudly lists “High difficulty” as a feature. In clickers, difficulty is almost always a function of exponential scaling—larger numbers require longer waits. Clicker Age’s claim is either a misunderstanding of its own genre or a nod to a deliberately punishing, non-linear progression curve. Community guides and discussions do not elaborate on “difficulty” in terms of skill-based challenges, suggesting it refers to the sheer grind required, possibly made worse by poor balancing.

The Fatal Flaw: Save System Catastrophe: The single most defining systemic element, as documented in user guides and forum posts, is a game-breaking technical flaw. As succinctly stated in a Steam guide titled “Fix for achievement issues”: “Due to poor development practices, this game and another called ‘ClickMonster’ share the exact same executable and file save location.” This means save files from ClickMonster—a similarly themed game—can be erroneously loaded by Clicker Age, instantly corrupting the player’s progress and locking achievements. The guide’s existence is a damning indictment. It reveals a complete lack of attention to basic application data isolation, a rookie error that transforms a casual idle experience into a minefield of potential lost progress. This is not a “flawed system”; it is a broken foundation.

Progression & UI: The “Fixed / flip-screen” perspective implies a static or screen-by-screen UI, likely displaying the player’s units, the enemy horde, and clicker buttons. The “point and select” interface fits. The Steam store mentions “buying various improvements,” suggesting a standard tiered upgrade tree. However, the “Lots of Monsters” feature is ambiguous—does this mean monster types as units? Or enemy varieties? Without in-game footage or detailed descriptions, it’s impossible to assess if this adds meaningful tactical variety or is merely cosmetic.

The game’s six Steam Achievements (linked to clicking 5k/10k times and defeating World 3) are notoriously broken for many users, a direct consequence of the save file corruption issue and possibly poor trigger coding.

World-Building, Art & Sound: A Promise Unfulfilled

The store blurb’s emphasis on “Incredibly beautiful and dynamic Clicker” and “beautiful visual style” sets a high bar that the available evidence does not meet. MobyGames classifies the visual style as “Fixed / flip-screen,” suggesting static, pre-rendered or hand-drawn backgrounds with character/unit sprites. The community screenshots on Steam are described as containing “Russian pictures in shop,” hinting at possible localization asset mishandling or reused placeholder art. There is no critical or community analysis of the art direction, implying it is competent but unremarkable—a functional fantasy aesthetic that fails to distinguish itself in a genre crowded with charming pixel art (e.g., Pony Clicker) or sleek vector graphics.

“Dynamic Music” is a bold claim for a 25 MB clicker. It likely refers to a single looped track or very simple state changes (e.g., a more intense track for boss waves). In the context of an idle game where players often have it running in the background for hours, “dynamic” is a minor plus, not a headline feature.

The “Fantasy” setting is the thinnest of coats. There is no world to build—only a succession of “World 1,” “World 2,” etc. No guilds to join, no towns to explore, no narrative context for the monsters. The world-building is non-existent, existing only as a label in the genre metadata.

Reception & Legacy: A Story of Obscurity and Error

Clicker Age exists in a state of near-total obscurity. Its MobyScore is “n/a” due to a lack of critic reviews. Steam user reviews are severely limited (24 total per Steambase, with a “Mixed” 46/100 score, split 11 positive/13 negative). Kotaku’s database listing provides no editorial content.

The reception that does exist is dominated by technical frustration. The most “helpful” Steam reviews and guides are not about strategy, but about fixing broken achievements and understanding save file corruption. One user reports the game opening at an absurdly progressed “level 95,” instantly granting an achievement, and being stuck there upon reset—a symptom of the shared save location bug. Another laments: “broken achievements… lock you out of playing. and also lock you out of getting 100% achievements…” The review summary reads less like a critique of game design and more like a support ticket for a defective product.

Its commercial performance is negligible. Priced at $1.99, it has never appeared on major sale trackers or in curated storefront features. Its “legacy” within the clicker genre is as a footnote—a game notable primarily for ClickMonster‘s shadow and its own execution failures. It has no discernible influence on subsequent games. It did not innovate mechanically; its “beautiful visual style” claim went unremarked upon; its technical implosion serves only as a negative example for other small developers on the importance of proper save file management.

Compared to its “related games” listed by MobyGames—Grim Clicker (2020), Doomsday Clicker (2016), Clicker Guild (2016)—Clicker Age is the least known and most problematic. Doomsday Clicker is praised for its dark humor and polish; Clicker Guild has a defined social/guild structure. Clicker Age has none of these distinguishing features and is instead weighed down by bugs.

Conclusion: A Cautionary Artifact

Clicker Age is not a game that fails because it is simplistic; clickers are definitionally simple. It fails because it is careless. Its ambition to present a “beautiful” fantasy clicker is undermined by a fundamental lack of polish, most egregiously in its shared executable/save file fiasco that sabotages player progress and achievements. The “high difficulty” is not a design challenge but a probable side-effect of poor balancing or the frustration induced by its technical issues.

As a historical artifact, it is significant only as a data point: it represents the low-fidelity, low-visibility underbelly of the 2020 indie clicker boom. It demonstrates that even a modestly aestheticized genre can be sunk by development 101 mistakes. There is no “must-play” experience here, no hidden depth, no charming bugs to forgive. There is only a functional, buggy, aesthetically indifferent idle game that serves as a textbook example of how not to manage application data. For the historian, Clicker Age is valuable as a warning. For the player, it is a skip. Its place in history is not on a pedestal, but in the appendix: a lesson in the paramount importance of technical integrity, even in the simplest of games.

Final Verdict: 3/10 – A technically broken and thematically hollow clicker whose only legacy is a cautionary tale about save file management. Avoid.