So far I have said that a game is better if it takes up fewer of your resources. A game that is free is clearly better than a game you have to pay money for. By the same metric, idle games are fantastic because they’re games you can play without even having to play games. They do have a problem where they go on too long, however.

Now it’s time to address the main point of this article: Cookie Clicker. How could I get this far in the article without mentioning Cookie Clicker??? Well, I’m here to tell the Cookie Clicker fans out there that Cookie Clicker is Just Okay. My main problem with it is this: the main way players “play” an idle game is by determining what the best strategy is for moving forward as quickly as possible, and I think Cookie Clicker doesn’t give players easy access to the tools for doing this. I played for hours without understanding what made golden cookies appear or what the milk on my screen meant. That being said, it does have its advantages and I understand why people like it. Antimatter Dimensions is just better.

My favorite idle game is Antimatter Dimensions. It has a very good premise that appeals to my love of math and gets built on as the game progresses. To start, the player only has access to a “First Dimension” which produces antimatter at a constant rate. After spending this anitmatter for a “Second Dimension”, the player is given a constant source of First Dimensions. Eventually this builds all the way up to “Eighth Dimensions”. As the game progresses the player buys Eighth Dimensions faster and faster and is able to get a clearer picture of how this mechanic of creating lower level dimensions behaves (like an exponential function, it turns out). I still didn’t finish Antimatter Dimensions, though, because it got too slow by the end.

My second favorite idle game has to be “Press the button” on Armor Games. It has a cutesy aesthetic full of loveable goblins and powerful wizards that made me want to just watch the game play. It also had a very entertaining set of upgrades that kept me very entertained as I watched my little goblins jump on the button over and over. It is a very underrated game and definitely deserves more attention, especially given how easy it is to understand.