Clicker games - those games about clicking away for hours on end while the stats go up and up and up - are probably the weirdest, the most uncanny of all video game species. On a fundamental level, they're absolutely mindless, your interaction with them reduced to the most basic of activities, while the rewards you reap quickly scale to a point far beyond parody. But is that really the fundamental level here? Because sometimes you can go much deeper, and you'll find that the very best clicker games eventually take you to some very strange places indeed. I can barely describe this place, sadly. I know nothing at all about maths, nothing at all about numbers and even less about infinity and the infinity of sizes that infinity comes in. And yet, with a good clicker game, as I steer woozily into the tenth, twentieth, hundredth hour of tapping away, I occasionally get a weird sense of the innate rhythms of numbers, the way the upgrades start to create neat rows in my mind, the way that the quantities of units I've bought and developed start to form curves. In the midst of the click-click-clicking, it sometimes feels like you get a sense of the texture of maths. In the act of click-click-clicking, you get to run your thumb over the bumpy surface of the realm of numbers.
I may have gone a bit far with that one. Anyway: I like clicker games far more than I should, and I find them interesting in ways that, transparently, I cannot adequately describe. Here's something else I like: twin-stick shooters. They're almost the antithesis of clickers, right? In clicker games, you pick an objective in the distant future and park your imagination there for a while as your hands click-click-click towards it. Twin-stick shooters, however, are all about skill and twitch and a focus on what is happening right now, in the instant that is playing out all around you as baddies flock and swarm and kite across the screen. So what happens if you combine the immediacy of twin-sticks with the glimpse of the infinite that the clicker can afford?
You get Vostok Inc. And Vostok Inc is a marvel.
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