16 Oct 2025 5 min read video games

Quick-rementals - my new favorite genre

A game demo had me reflecting on a newer sub-genre of incremental games that I really appreciate. I list out 9 different games in the genre that I think are worth trying.

Photo by Igor Karimov 🇺🇦 / Unsplash

I just finished the demo of A Game About Feeding A Black Hole, and it has reminded me how much I enjoy this new genre of "quick incremental" games.

Lets take a step back..

Incremental games. What are they?

The most common shorthand for talking about incremental games is "number goes up." Most of them revolve around the gameplay loop of "do a thing, earn resources, use the resources to do the thing more efficiently, earn more resources" and this repeats pretty much forever. The "fun" comes from seeing the amount of resources you generate get (incrementally) bigger and bigger.

I've played a load of incremental games - Cookie Clicker, The Paperclip Game, Adventure X (Capitalist, Communist), Untitled Space Game, IdleOn, etc - and aside from paperclip, most games in this genre rely on offering you in-game purchases to help get past walls. These "walls" are some thing in your way of progressing to unlock the next resource generator or boost that makes you more efficient or powerful.

Hitting that "pay to progress" wall is usually when I stop playing the game. A lot of times I've already paid for the game itself, so having to pay for a usable token/buff/boost in order to keep playing feels wrong. And for the free games, if I want to not pay I have to wait days, weeks, or years in order to make small steps forward without paying - sometimes up to $100 for tokens or gems or whatever bauble is spent for boosts.

Where "Quick-rementals" are different is in the core structure of the game. Incremental games might have some narrative world that it exists in, but the game is about the loop, not the story. Quick-rementals however have a much more narrative arc to them, and progressing is usually tied to reaching certain milestones or overcoming some "boss" mechanic.

And they have an end.

An incremental you could, in theory, play until you run out of stuff to buy to make you stronger. A Quick-remental ends when the narrative does.. There might be a bonus achievement for doing a specific task or a challenge mode to see how far you can progress with limitations or new game rules, but the finite amount of things to do is usually finished in a few sittings.

I finished the demo for A Game About Feeding A Black Hole in about 30 minutes, and I am looking forward to see what the full game looks like. There are challenge modes, new upgrades, and an "idle mode" that I am guessing would make it function like a screen saver. If you've never played an incremental game, this would be a good one to try. You'll be able to see if it is a genre you enjoy.