Preview: Cookie Clicker

Who doesn’t love cookies? Crazy people, that’s who! Cookies are cool, but you know what’s cooler than being cool? A billion cookies. Cookie Clicker has to be one of the biggest surprises for me personally in gaming this year. It’s sort of like this year’s Frog Fractions. If you haven’t played Frog Fractions you really should, but more importantly, you should play Cookie Clicker.

Cookie Clicker is a simple web game where your objective is to click on and collect cookies. You start out by having to click on the giant cookie on the screen to earn cookies yourself, but eventually you will have earned enough cookies to start buying mouse cursors that will click on the cookie and earn cookies for you. Your earning of cookies is measured in cookies per second. I have been playing the game for quite some time and earn about seven billion cookies a second. You will start earning cookies fairly slowly but with enough upgrades and buildings you’ll be swimming in cookies – just like me. The more cookies you earn the more you can upgrade the cursors and even start buying better macro buildings to earn more cookies for you. With this type of progression system the grind for earning more cookies and buying better upgrades and buildings is incredibly addictive. So much so that I have been playing the game on and off for about the last twenty days or so. There are stats that keep track of how many times you have clicked and how many total cookies you have earned and so forth, which is nice if you’re a big numbers dork.

“Making it rain” just got a whole lot sweeter.

The game doesn’t seem to be technically “done,” but it is in a state similar to the games you see on Steam Early Access either. The game is totally free and is available for you to play right now. There is an achievement system which is mostly tied to you buying upgrades and you buying a certain number of buildings. By earning achievements you start to gain milk which helps you earn more cookies. There are new updates coming to the game which sound exciting and I will probably still be playing the game by the time the updates are out.

If you thought I was going to write a preview for a game called Cookie Clicker and NOT have a picture of Cookie Monster, you’re crazy.

The game also has a good sense of humor to it. Tons of cookie jokes are spread throughout the game and the flavour text written for each upgrade and building is pretty clever. The menu layout is really well done and makes checking stats and getting back to your upgrades and buildings really easy. Cookie Clicker is an incredibly addictive game and one I would recommend to anyone, cookie lover or not. I am very interested in seeing how Cookie Clicker evolves and updates. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some cookies to bake.