Played Nodebuster
I was a huge fan of the weird, "horizon-breaking" idle games that kicked off the idle/incremental game genre. I liked stuff like Candy Box, A Dark Room, and Kittens Game a lot more than stuff like Cookie Clicker or Adventure Capitalist. I did like Universal Paperclips a lot, too.
If a game in this genre plays with its form a bit, and tries to surprise you with stuff you don't initially even suspect might appear in the game, I'm generally a fan.
I started following the "incremental games" subreddit because it's a fascinating look into a community that is still mostly dominated by hobbyist developers and still subject to indie hobbyist social dynamics. It's frequently home to debates about terminology, inspirations, clones, etc. in a way that reminds me of the online communities I used to lurk in during college. I very rarely play any of the games discussed there, but I often find myself reading threads where people argue!
A week or so ago I saw a thread where someone was discussing the game Nodebuster in a way that reminded me very sharply of other conversations I'd seen about emerging genres previously in indie hobbyist communities.
I'm sure that you people all know what Nodebuster is, but in case you don't: Nodebuster is a game that leans very heavily into incremental gameplay and has very little idling time, only in the late game if you're going for 100%.
... the poster then goes on to describe all the game's features.
If this sounds similar to you, it's because many games have used these mechanics since Nodebuster exploded in popularity. It has gotten to the point where most short-form idle games has borrowed at least one of its mechanics from it. And why wouldn't they? It works! Now you might ask what makes these games different from the many games that look like Antimatter Dimensions or Modding Tree and the answer is simple: Nodebusterlikes get put on Steam with a price tag.
What I want to ask you all is whether Nodebuster has been a good thing or a bad thing for the incremental games market. While I think that the game itself is really good, I'm honestly pretty disappointed about that some incremental devs I see on Steam, Itch and this Subreddit are trying to ride its coattails.
I loooooove reading these kinds of state-of-the-scene arguments in communities I have no personal relationship to. It was nostalgic enough for me to read this that I actually went and bought Nodebuster, to see what it was actually like.
It was really a fascinating experience. Nodebuster feels less like a game to me and more like a demonstration... like a game that was created to demonstrate certain mechanics and certain combinations of mechanics which can manipulate a player's emotions and compulsions. It felt like it was designed merely to demonstrate the functionality of a certain set of strategies.
Enemies are shapes - squares, pentagons, circles, pills, etc. Enemy types are just colors - red, blue, yellow, and purple. It takes about half the game to unlock any damaging mechanics which aren't just "move your mouse cursor over an enemy to periodically damage it." The mechanics you do get - drones that attack on their own, chain lightning damage that spreads from your attacks, bullets that shoot out from your attacks - these are all the kinds of things I would expect to see in a game like this.
There are so, so few of them, really. I feel like most games I play have more breathless ambition than this. They wouldn't stop at just three "abilities."
Anyway, the game is completable in about 3 hours, and I fully completed it, as far as I can tell. By the last 45 minutes of my experience, all fighting felt like a chore, and I was just hoovering up drifts of coins, not really paying any attention to the enemies... or to anything that was happening onscreen. I experienced no risk of death for the last 5 levels of the game, and had to play the game's final level several times to earn enough currency to just hit the "end game" button.
Even the more dynamic middle of the game felt like this. I often died for reasons I couldn't understand. There are a lot of upgrades in the upgrade tree, and a lot of them have no visual feedback whatsoever - particularly the upgrades relating to armor and enemy damage. It's very difficult to tell what is going on, which is pretty crazy for such a spare game, where the enemies are so visually simple and the combat is so uncomplex. There seems to have been ample room to explain this stuff... but the game just doesn't.
There's a long time in the middle of this game where I could not even see my cursor onscreen, could not understand why I was dying, and could not figure out how to play "more effectively." I kept going pretty much only because the numbers were going up and I was regularly progressing along the game's upgrade tree. Again: a demonstration of an effective way to influence people's behavior!
The game does feel sometimes like a game that would be playing in the background of a shot in a cyber-dystopia movie. "We've created a digital experience that can control any teen in the world," they might say. And then we'd get a shot of a slack-jawed kid exploding circles and squares on a CRT monitor.
The funny thing is that Nodebuster is so short that it's really not malicious at all. The game is only about 3 hours long. That's why it feels to me like a demonstration... I could easily see a game using this basic structure to really obliterate someone's time, but Nodebuster doesn't.
It's very odd to find that my experience playing this game really did align with the desperate fight-seeking behavior of that random redditor. Yeah, Nodebuster is a platter of small, well-illustrated mechanics that other games could steal, like little snacks at a wedding reception or something. Is it a good thing? Well, I'm not going to play all these clones, because this is a scene that I watch, not one that I participate in. Maybe it's a good thing? Maybe it isn't. I am not interested in finding out.
It was funny to see some commenters describing this game as a "labor of love" when it really does feel to me more like a labor of study, or of careful planning and spreadsheet-editing. It feels to me like a game that a researcher would make. It works on you in a very clear, analyzable way. It feels like it exists in order to spawn a genre of coattail-riders. And, blessedly, it's short enough to be completely harmless. What a wild game!