Holy Shit

Holy Shit is a minimalist and satirical idle clicker game where players click on feces to accumulate points, inspired by the simplicity of games like Cave Crawler. With basic pixelated visuals and a humorous premise, it abruptly ends when the score reaches 100, offering a brief, free-to-play experience that pokes fun at incremental game mechanics.

Holy Shit: Review

Introduction: The Cologne of Digital Existence

To approach Holy Shit is to confront a mirror held up to the very soul of gaming’s most maligned yet persistent genre: the idle clicker. Released into the wilds of Steam on May 27, 2022, by a solitary developer using the handle MisteryJay89 (Michel Gebser), this title presents itself with a bluntness that is either profoundly offensive or conceptually pristine. Its thesis is a dagger aimed at the heart of player motivation: what remains of “gameplay” when all conventional mechanics—progression, challenge, narrative, stakes—are systematically, almost militantly, stripped away? Holy Shit is not a game in the traditional sense; it is a behavioral experiment, a 50-megabyte koan, and perhaps the most honest expression of the idle game’s ultimate logical endpoint: a tacit admission that the act of clicking is the entire point, and the point is, ultimately, nothing. This review will argue that Holy Shit is a deliberate anti-game, a piece of conceptual art that uses the language of interactivity to critique the vacuous cycles of compulsion that underpin much of modern gaming, particularly the free-to-play and live-service models that dominated the industry landscape of its release year.

Development History & Context: A One-Man Protest in GameMaker

The developmental context of Holy Shit is as sparse as its content. Credited to a single individual, Michel Gebser, and built in the accessible GameMaker engine, the game exists outside the typical pipelines of studio development, marketing budgets, and publisher expectations. Its release in late May 2022 places it within a year of profound industry contradiction. The Wikipedia chronicle of 2022 in video games details a landscape of multi-billion dollar acquisitions (Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard bid, Sony’s purchase of Bungie), major hardware launches (the Steam Deck), and critically lauded, mechanically rich titles like Elden Ring, God of War Ragnarök, and Stray. Against this backdrop of cinematic production values and complex systemic design, Holy Shit emerges like a glitch in the matrix—a single pixel on a screen, asking for 100 clicks. Its stated inspiration, “poking fun at click to ten and the simple aesthetics of Cave Crawler,” positions it not as a commercial venture but as a deliberately reductive parody. The technological constraints are not limitations but the medium itself; the “visuals” are a static, crude sprite of feces, and the “interface” is a point-and-select cursor. This is development as minimalist statement, using the democratizing tools of indie game creation to produce something that actively mocks the very notion of scale and ambition.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive: The Story of a Click

Holy Shit possesses a narrative in the same way a blank page possesses a story: it is a vessel for projection. The “plot” is explicitly stated: click feces to reach a score of 100, at which point the game closes. There are no characters, no dialogue, no diegesis. Yet, within this vacuum, a powerful thematic core asserts itself. The game is a satire of punitive, unrewarding labor—a digital Skinner box where the only “reward” is the cessation of the activity itself. The act of clicking is rendered both sacred and absurd. The feces, a universal symbol of waste, becomes the ultimate McGuffin, a object of pure, unadorned transaction. The implied narrative is one of capitalist futility: you are tasked with generating “points” (a pure abstraction of value) from literal excrement, and upon reaching an arbitrary threshold (100), your purpose is terminated. The game’s title and content form a grotesque commentary on productivity porn and grind culture. It asks: if a game has no ending state of meaning, no cutscene, no boss, no new ability, is the journey merely a punishment? The “story” is the player’s own internal monologue—the dawning realization, around click 70, that this is all there is, and the subsequent negotiation with one’s own completionist compulsions to finish the task. It is a narrative about the emptiness of achievement divorced from context.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems: The Architecture of Nothing

The gameplay loop of Holy Shit is perhaps the most distilled in history:
1. Launch game.
2. Observe single interactive element: a pixelated pile of feces.
3. Click feces.
4. Observe counter increment by 1.
5. Repeat steps 3-4 until counter = 100.
6. Game closes automatically.
This is it. There is no variation, no risk, no failure state (other than the moral decay of the player’s own patience). The “systems” are brutally elegant: a counter variable and a conditional statement (if score >= 100 then quit). The only innovation, if it can be called that, is the integration of Steam’s achievement system. Each click, from 1 to 100, triggers a unique Steam Achievement. This transforms the experience from a simple task into a “collection” minigame. The gameplay is no longer about reaching 100; it is about witnessing 100 distinct digital trophies pop up, a carnival of validation for meaningless acts. This mechanic brilliantly co-opts the player’s conditioned response to achievement hunting, creating a perverse incentive structure. The “progression” is purely meta-textual: your Steam profile’s achievement count rises. The user interface is non-existent beyond the sprite and the score counter. There are no menus, no settings, no options. This lack of agency—you cannot pause, adjust volume, or even close the window manually until the end—is a design choice that enforces a total, unmediated experience of the loop. It is either a flaw or the point: you are trapped in the system until the system releases you.

World-Building, Art & Sound: The Aesthetic of Anti-Polish

Holy Shit‘s world is a single, static screen. The “setting” is implied: the digital void where this lone turd resides. There is no atmosphere, no environmental storytelling, no visual direction beyond the crude, low-resolution sprite described on its Steam page as “Pixel Graphic.” The color palette is monochromatic or severely limited, adhering to a “Minimalist” and “Retro” ethos that feels less like a stylistic choice and more like a philosophical one. The act of rendering the subject in pixel art is itself a joke—elevating the base to the aesthetic, a digital act of alchemy that changes nothing. The “Retro Sound” is equally sparse; reportedly, there is little to no audio, or perhaps a single, looping, grating sound effect on click. This audio-visual package does not seek to immerse; it seeks to repel and reduce. It contributes to the overall experience by creating a sense of profound anti-climax. Where modern games invest millions in cinematic intros and orchestral scores, Holy Shit offers a single, ugly sprite and the sound of your own clicks (or the imagined sound of them). This starkness forces the player to confront the bare mechanical act, stripping away all sensory distraction. The world is not one to explore but one to endure, a digital waiting room with only one object in it.

Reception & Legacy: The Divide Between Intent and Interpretation

Reception for Holy Shit is a study in polar opposites, filtered through the lens of platform culture. On MobyGames, the single user review by “piltdown_man” is a masterclass in blunt critique: “There is no gaming experience here and, unless you like collecting meaningless Steam achievements, there is no point to it either.” This view aligns with a traditional, experiential definition of a game. Conversely, on Steam, as of the latest available data, it boasts a “Very Positive” rating (85% of 291 reviews). This stark divide is the game’s true legacy. The Steam audience, operating within a ecosystem glutted with “joke” games, visual novels, and hyper-casual time-wasters, seems to have embraced Holy Shit ironically or as a novelty. The 100 achievements are cited repeatedly in positive reviews as the primary draw—the game is a “quick 100 achievements” trophy hunt. Its influence on the industry is negligible in a direct sense; no major studio will cite it as an inspiration. However, its legacy is as a perfect data point in the ongoing conversation about game definition, the psychology of achievement systems, and the viability of pure conceptual works in a commercial marketplace. In 2022, a year that also saw the release of the minimalist puzzle game Toree 3D and the absurdist adventure Potion Permit, Holy Shit stands as the most extreme example of “less is more” taken to a nihilistic extreme. It demonstrates that on Steam, a game can gain traction not despite having no gameplay, but because of it, existing as a curiosity and a trophy on a player’s profile.

Conclusion: A Defiantly Empty Vessel

Holy Shit is not a good game by any conventional metric. It has no fun, no challenge, no emotional payoff, and no artistic merit in a traditional sense. Its visuals are crude, its “soundtrack” is silence, and its entire content can be consumed in under a minute. To recommend it would be preposterous. And yet, as a historical artifact and a piece of critical design, it is startlingly effective. It is a perfect hack of the player’s own completionism and the platform’s achievement economy. It reduces the clicker genre to its absolute core: a compulsion loop with zero payoff, exposing the hollow center of much “grind” in AAA live-service games. Its place in video game history is not as a beloved classic or an influential title, but as a cornerstone example of “anti-game” design—a work that uses the formal language of games to argue against their own necessity. It is a silent, digital scream into the void of infinite content, a single click that says, “This is all it is. Are you satisfied?” The answer, as evidenced by its Steam reviews, is a resounding, ironic, and deeply human “Yes.” For that, Holy Shit earns its place not on a shelf of greats, but in a museum of ideas—a stark, ugly, and unforgettable monument to the question: “Why do we play?”