I’ve never really clicked with idle or clicker games because they feel a bit too hands off and passive. Instead, I prefer to have games that make me feel in control or that my decisions matter. This is the feeling The Gnorp Apologue gave me by merging together an idle game with roguelike runs where your choices can backfire or really propel your game progress forward.
Gnorps are tiny cute little creatures that want to get rich. They’ll be getting rich by mining a rock for shards and collecting those shards from the pile of shards that spew out of the rock. The rock is infinitely full of abundance and the Gnorps want it all. After a few clicks to get some shards stored in your coffers, you’ll move away from clicking to management of shard collection and mining. To do this you’ll spend shards to build housing for more Gnorps and then assign those Gnorps to buildings. They could be runners to collect shards or various attackers to mine the rock for more shards faster. This builds up exponentially as more buildings unlock giving you more things to try out. Mountaineers can climb the shard pile and crunch down the tip, rockets can blast the rock, flowers can be mined into acid vomit or shockwaves and where the shards fly to is of great importance.
When the shard pile gets too big, it will compress, sucking all the shards back into the rock and leaving you with condensed shards to mine. These are worth more than the previous shards and the idea is to reach 10 compressions and build a final building to mine forever but to do that you’ll need multiple restarts. This is because upon each compression, the rock starts getting angrier and sucks shards you’ve mined back into itself again. The more compressions, the more aggressive the vacuum and you simply cannot keep throwing money at the situation.
To counter this there are two currencies to up you keep up. Zybellium is generated upon every compression and works as a limited currency to buy big upgrades. Turn arrows to rockets, guns to machine guns with big ammo clips, introduce new buildings or Gnorp types – its up to you. They are very limited though and so your decisions lock you into certain run types until very late in the game when your decisions can open up a bit more. Zybellium help you level up your shard collection efficiency which in turn lets you earn prestige points when you hit a certain collection rate. These are to be spent between runs on your talent board. These talents are grouped into various blocks of talents but allow you to add fire or ice elements to attacks, unlock new buildings, allow multiple effects to run together instead of choosing between them and so on.
The idea of The Gnorp Apologue is to synergise your builds so that you spend talent points and Zybellium in a way that maximises both attack and collection so that you can best the rock’s angry vacuum and reach the tenth compression event. It will take many hours but each run should in theory allow you to get further and then further faster. However, if you don’t spend in a way that makes a strategy work, you will waste a run because you can’t earn more prestige points to unlock more ways to do more damage or collect shards quicker. All the buildings have tweakable elements to them and some can be turned on or off to alter your path too.
Of course, The Gnorp Apologue is still an idle game. I’d make build changes and have it running minimised whilst I ate dinner in the evening and watched a show, checking back in to make improvements and tweaks. However unlike many idle and clicker games where I’m just watching an endless score rise up quicker, this build and goal orientated design gave me and it purpose and a proper ending. That meant I had more satisfaction playing and felt invested in these tiny creatures running around at speed doing their thing.
The Gnorp Apologue won’t change the world but its one of the few idle games outside of maybe Plantera where I’ve felt interested and connected enough to the world to want to spend time making decisions in it. I felt like what I chose made a tangible difference and getting to the end was my reward. A nice gateway entry to the world of idle games for those who think idle games are a huge waste of time.
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