Game development gets its time in the incremental sunshine with the title It’s Fine. This is an idle incremental, so do not expect to be actively doing much to make the number go up. I need to warn everyone in advance that this is not a game sub-genre I enjoy. However, what It’s Fine lacks in gameplay, it does try to catch up on by bringing lots of incremental systems to the party.
The game starts out as a clicker game, with each click being a line of code created for your game that needs to be ready for launch tomorrow (in-game time). Clicking turns to auto-click almost immediately, before the auto-clicks are taken over by managing up to 12 game development stations. Each one has its own menu of upgrades, relying on different machine power or social media likes to generate improvements. The different systems power each other, so you can’t leave one too far behind another, and so most of the gameplay is diving between menus to select an upgrade. Even this menu laddering can be streamlined with bulk upgrades or auto-upgrade to spend your power currencies, so It’s Fine can almost play itself.
Whilst this idleness is personally limiting, I can understand the dopamine appeal of watching 12 interconnected systems make bigger numbers towards an actual goal. Only a couple of systems require any player interaction, and they are the 10th and 11th stations to unlock. One is a 3D Printer that will print various booster artefacts that can boost a stat globally, and that requires some selections and rerolls if you don’t like what the RNG Gods have given you. The other is watering a garden for a limited-time boost to a station. It’s FarmVille-level interactivity, and the garden can be left alone, in all honesty.
Where It’s Fine’s design philosophy is interesting but potentially quite repetitive is in its multi-prestige progression system. As a game dev, you must sleep eventually, and doing so resets your current run stats to zero but opens up your game dev skill tree. There are about 70 upgrades in the skill tree to boost the multipliers of certain stations or add combo meters to them. One introduces fork lightning from your CEO, a rodent on a wheel, that supercharges other stations for a second. Another introduced birds that hatch and leave bonus eggs at stations for boosts. These are fine, but they only carry over for your individual run. Progression on the skill tree is tied to a specific machine-generated currency, too, so you can’t complete missions, for example, to boost your skill-tree progression.
The 8th station to unlock is a time-travelling machine, because the story declares you’ll not finish the game in time, so we need to go back to yesterday to keep building. The time machine has its own internal incremental currencies, but once you’ve charged the machine up to 100%, it starts to convert its power into technical booster currency. When the time is right, you can travel back in time and unlock the meta-prestige upgrades. There are four types of progression. They either make each upgrade X% more powerful or speed up the game’s production by X% too. Once you’ve chosen those, you start back at the beginning with no skill tree, that clicker game, and you’ll whizz through what you spent hours idly waiting for in minutes, only to reach another steep incline. It’s very clear that the game is balanced to force this meta-progression several times, and it stretches already thin mechanics into a 12-hour game, rather than a more structured 6-8-hour game.
I left It’s Fine running as I was packing up boxes for a future house move. That meant the game didn’t take over my brain, but I did keep returning to the game to check progress and bulk update things. Progress is steady, and whilst it is rigid, it’s constant. From an upgrade perspective, It’s Fine does a good job to keep things chugging along. I wish there was more interactivity, but as an idle-embracing incremental game, this is about as invested as I can get in this type of game.
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