I've played through UP twice. When it comes to time sinks, it's nowhere near the ultimate death spiral that is Kittens Game. To date it has taken me about 5 times as long as a UP playthrough (and 500+ lines of JS automation which I seem to have to tweak every day to deal with the changing economy) and I don't seem to be anywhere near the end.
I'm happy to have not tried Kittens and will stay away from it. UP wasn't too bad. It was a time sink until I played all the way through it, and then wasn't too bad. The murderous game for me was 2048. I had to block the site in /etc/hosts to break out of the game. More recently, duckduckgo has embedded it as an easter egg in their search screen, so it's harder to block that way.
I also waste time on chess puzzles, lichess.org/training , but that isn't so bad since it's easier to pull away, and I felt for a while like it was helping my game, and decided to count that as improving my mind, as contrasted with 2048 which is pure inanity.
In terms of time commitment, Kittens was tops (I had the game running for close to a year in the background), but in terms of enjoyment, I have to say my favorite incremental game is Idle Loops: https://omsi6.github.io/loops/
The way I broke out of addiction to the Kittens game is by using save game editors, which I warmly recommend.
Before that, I have spent days with it piggybacking on my brainwaves. But after that, I lost interest, feeling overwhelmed with the complexity of the game.
I only broke my Diablo 2 addiction in college when I used one of those tools that drives your character on Mephisto runs to scum drops.
In the course of one night running it unattended, I got the two items I'd been looking for for weeks. Cheating at the game broke me out of the Skinner box overnight.
I had a hard time with that one. I tried leaving the CD at the office, but late at night when the withdrawal kicked in I ended up driving to the office and fetching it anyway. I truly felt like the meta-story of the game was that the CD itself was the crystal and the player was the traveler.
I like your quitting story. I quit when my very high level character died, in hardcore mode. Thinking about the hours that went into that character was horrifying.
I generally play “roguelike” games (the most important criterion of which, in my opinion, is permadeath), and I often feel the same way.. the thing is that I feel that way win or lose.
This is more or less how I play incremental games. Play until
I realize how much time I’m wasting, then switch over to figuring out how to hack the game.
By played through, do you mean you got to the top corner of the universes? Did you get also all of the artifacts or complete all of the universes? (I’m not sure what counts as played through.) I did maybe a dozen universes and got a handful of artifacts before I bailed and deleted the game.
The "universe map" with the artefacts is a mobile app only feature. [1]
The browser version just has an ending choice that lets you restart with slightly different variables (in my case it was 10% higher demand)
I don't remember anything about artifacts; I just went to the web page and there were no further buttons to click to continue playing - I'd have to reset.
Oh come on now!!!
Why did you have to mention Kittens Game, I've got actual work to do. Who has the time to gather catnip during their normal working hours...oh look a new kitten has joined my village :-)
I'm on year 37,000 of my current reset; 3k more will get me the last achievement with a star. Of course in the meantime they added some new challenges...
I've played KG for over a year IRL. Run number 18, over 19k in game years.
I want to get back in but a lot has changed and I'm struggling to recall all the details to be able to pick it back up and what I should focus on. Any tips?
Still, Kittens Game is nothing to the death spiral distilled into its true form in Antimatter Dimensions. If there was ever a piece of software which warranted getting classified as weaponry, it'd be this.
