Tower Wizard’s Steam page describes it as an “incremental” game, which is defined by Wikipedia thusly:

An incremental game is a video game subgenre characterized by the incremental accumulation of in-game resources, and gradual, often exponential progression…

I’ve played a lot of RPGs like that.

…through repetitive actions or automation.

I haven’t played a lot of RPGs with this little gameplay, though. They’re also called “idle games,” because the player does little to nothing.

I decided to give Tower Wizard a shot. I’ve been wanting to try a few games outside of my normal comfort zone; I vaguely remembered playing Progress Quest and being entranced by its progress bars and goofiness; and the price was right.

Anyway…

Step 1. You’re a wizard, minding your own business out in the wilderness, when an Orb – it’s like a crystal ball, but about 15 feet in diameter – appears in front of you and offers to do something “useful” for you if you feed it magic. That something, you quickly learn, is conjuring a wizard’s tower and then levitating above its peaked roof, waiting to absorb more magic.

Step 2. Start using the Orb to summon spirits. You’ll be turning the first few into Cloudlings, which… I’m not sure what they’re doing, exactly. They’re spitting spirit magic onto the Orb? Anyway, that vastly outpaces the paltry amount of magic you’re able to give it, and you can stop clicking now. Maybe forever.

Step 3. Once you’ve gathered enough magic, you’ll be given the option to embiggen the tower and add another room, which you can assign spirits to and gather a different resource…

As soon as you’re given the chance to make your Cloudlings more productive, you should take it, because each spirit costs more to summon and that cost is probably in the thousands by now. That’s not going to get better; by the endgame, you’ll be seeing costs in the low to mid quadrillions.

Sure, some idle-game paragons have spent literal years running Progress Quest in the background, but that shouldn’t be necessary here. If you stack up enough bonuses and synergies, you can beat this game in a reasonable number of hours…

It doesn’t have quite the same mesmerizing quality as Progress Quest, though, maybe because the comedy is absent. If you’re not watching a steady stream of eagle scouts and porn elementals get slaughtered by a half-halfling shiv knight, then you’re just watching a progress bar fill.

And Tower Wizard’s progress bars can be pretty slow; at one point in what I choose to call the midgame, I was looking at wait times of 45 minutes or more on everything. There are some good pixelly visuals for the spirits working away at their tasks, but they’re not that good.

I consider it a bad sign when the most effective way to play a game is to go read an EPUB on my phone and then take a nap.

And while I’m not going to give the dev crap for using Kevin MacLeod songs, I will give him a bit of crap for using only five of them, which I heard dozens of times each.

“Incremental games” won’t become a regular gaming habit for me any time soon… but this one was made well enough, overall.

While it didn’t engage me for anything like the 14 hours my Steam client claims I had it running, it did for at least an hour or two of that time. It has some visual flair, and it gave me some time to probably-overthink the symbolism of wizard towers growing until they poke a hole in the sky. And it only cost $2.99, so what the hell.

P.S. According to its Steam achievements, more people have beaten Tower Wizard (at time of writing) than have scrolled through its color settings.