Increlution
Survive the ever increasing pressure of time for as long as you can!
Increlution is a minimalistic incremental game about time management that takes inspiration from roguelite games. It’s up to you to survive as long as you can with the tools that you unlock throughout life, such as food or constructions. As time goes on, your health will decline increasingly faster until you’ll eventually die. However, death merely marks a new beginning. With every generation, your chances at survival will increase, because progress in previous lives increases your instincts.
Managing time
Throughout life, you’ll have access to various jobs, constructions and explorations. Using the step-by-step queue system, you can plan exactly what you want to happen and the game will automatically follow your orders. When your queue is empty, the game pauses automatically, so you don’t lose any of your precious time! This is a game about planning and strategizing, not a game about micro-management or clicking. However, if you prefer to play more real-time, you can prioritize anything over your queue at any time.
Skills
Every action uses one of many skills, such as Farming of Woodcutting. Every skill has two leveling types, Generation levels and Instinct levels. Generation levels increase more rapidly and provide a bigger benefit throughout life. Instinct levels increase at a slower pace, but persist through death, creating a permanent improvement for every following life. The combined effect of these levels directly affects how quickly you can perform actions that use these skills, allowing you to spend more of your time on other actions to increase your chances to survive!
Story based progression
You progress through the game with a story. Exploring the world allows you to discover new tools to improve your chances at survival. Unlike most incremental games, having a story also means the game includes no procedural content, and you’re actually able to complete the game. That story features approximately 160 hours of unpaused content with the current Early Access release. During Early Access, that story will be expanded significantly, until approximately 700 hours worth of unpaused content. When the story is finished entirely, a new game plus will most likely be added to offer an option to continue playing after completing the game.
Meta progression
Every generation will have better chances at survival than the last. The longer you survive, the more those chances will increase! This cycle of life and death plays a fundamental part in the overall progression through the game. Death is inevitable, but never pointless!
Understandable numbers, yet mathematically fluent
All progression within the game is carefully balanced to provide a consistent feeling of improvement, while numbers are tuned to remain understandable. Most bonuses compound, which keeps your progression consistent and meaningful, without requiring overly complicated mechanics. So you can focus on what matters most, survival!
Play the first chapter for free with the demo
Like many things in life, you can only truly judge whether something fits your liking by trying it first hand. For that reason, Increlution features a free demo so you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it! Try it yourself, and only join Early Access if you’re completely convinced that it’ll be worth your while! Progress made in the demo will automatically be synchronized to the full version through Steam Cloud, so you won’t lose any of your progress! The Demo features the first chapter and contains roughly 7 hours of unpaused content.
Interested? Try the demo right now by downloading it at the top of this page!
Game Discussion
Steam User 17
Fun game but abandoned due to developer health issues. At this point it's been longer without an update than it was being actively updated.
That said, did I get a couple of quid's worth of enjoyment out of the content that's there? Yes. It's good value for money, but unfortunately in an unfinished state.
On balance I'm giving it a thumbs up because even with that unfinished state it's still value for money, and enjoyable. But with the strong caveat that if you want the narrative to be finished and completing games is important to you, it may leave you annoyed.
The game itself is an interesting visual-novelesque incremental based around automating your path through a choose-your-own-adventure style story, with each loop giving you bonuses to the completed steps. This approach exposes some interesting mechanics compared to many other idler/incremental games, some of which end up having important counter-intuitive ramifications as you get deeper into the game.
This makes it a bit more thoughtful than some other incrementals, but can also lead to frustration when in the later stages multiple counter-intuitive mechanics end up trapping you in a situation where the fact that you're improving actually makes your progress harder. Once you figure these bumps in the road out and change your strategy it stops being an issue, but I suspect many people, after having been trained by multiple hours of gameplay that "getting better is getting better" are going to be a little miffed by the feeling of "getting better now appears actively harmful, and your goal is getting further away on each loop".
Some of this could be mitigated by some tutorialisation or a smoother introduction of the new concepts, but unfortunately most of this is in the final couple of chapters of the game which were the last updates before things dried up, so it may never happen - and it's possible a number of users will give up in frustration and feel the game has been left in a broken state rather than merely an unfinished one.
Hopefully I'll be proven wrong and once the developer returns to health they'll return to development, but reading of the old devblogs talking of 80+ hour weeks, I doubt (and honestly hope) that such an unsustainable pace belongs firmly in the past.
Steam User 10
A tentative reccomendation. The game is abandoned by the dev and will never be finished, but there's enough content right now to have fun, and the core idea is rather unique for an incremental game. It's $3.99, and that's about the correct price for the state the game is currently in, in my opinion.
Steam User 6
I suppose I should get around to leaving a review for this game since I have almost 600 hours in it. It's more than worth the price if you enjoy games that make numbers go up, whether that's idle games, roguelites, or rpgs. Buy this and enjoy.
Steam User 7
About the first three to four chapters were *chef smooch for this genre. By Chapter 6, the slog had begun in earnest. I gassed out ultimately at Chapter 9. This really feels like a game that didn't know when to quit.
Sigh... I think I still have to recommend it because even the first four chapters were worth the price of admission.
Steam User 7
Abandoned? Yeah probably.
Still worth the sticker price as it is though.
I personally love it, but it's not for everyone. Check out the demo if you're unsure.
Steam User 5
Immensely satisfying, though mostly intended to run in the background. Once you reach a "new" area you haven't yet encountered, you have to manually choose your actions and kind of micromanage your skills and remaining time. But once you've completed certain actions enough times, you get to tweak that individual action with automation and priority. This creates as a satisfying situation where areas you've done like 10 times get swooshed through with programmed efficiency, and then you get to nitpick any areas you haven't done like 10 times. Very good balance. Very long game! Still, I'm hoping for more. Looking forward to more expansions or updates or such, even after 1,000 hours.
Steam User 6
Written December 23rd 2024 Game price at writing: $3.99
I've apparently have this game running for over 3000 hours now, and found it funny I've not had words to describe why I love the game. It reminds me a bit of playing "Choose your own adventure" books as a youth. The game is mostly text based, and is about making choices to proceed in your adventure. You are doomed to die, but every run you gain skills, and learn more about the paths you are choosing. Run again, learn a bit more, and repeat.
And repeat, and repeat... but each chapter gets a little more interesting, and your skills allow you to race through previous chapters until they are nothing but a blink of an eye to get through. automation aids in this process, and after repeating actions enough times, you don't have to consciously choose to do them anymore: just tell the game you want to do them automatically from then on.
Until finally you are faced with a great foe in Chapter 11 (the current end of the game) which is an encounter unlike any other you've faced in all the previous game, but again you can choose your path through, and learn, and as always, repeat, gaining skills each time, until finally you fell the great foe, and with satisfaction, you are at... the end?
But no, you get to then choose some fun perks, and go again in NG+ mode. unlike most NG+ games, the repeated game is actually a little easier because of your new perks, while you don't really suffer any increase in difficulty. Instead, the challenge is trying to do it all again, in fewer loops, with smater paths to victory, until you stand victorious once again... and yet once again, you repeat.... endlessly getting just a little better... and suddenly you've been running over 3000 hours of loops... again and again, endless enjoyment, all for just a few dollars.
So... do I recommend? Yes, most empathatically, yes. I don't know if the game will really get still more updates. The Dev says yes, that they have tons of plans to continue, but it has been almost 2 years since the last chapters came out, and it is hard to say for sure just how much more the game will grow, but it is so... SO much worth it already, that I don't need more to recommend this game. I hope you'll give it a try, and enjoy!