
Kill the Lich is a minimalist incremental game about time compression and resource flow. Route your primary resource—Momentum—downstream to unlock over 300 actions. Design granular automation, visualize exposed formulas, and trigger deep prestige layers to ultimately defeat the Lich!
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About
Kill the Lich is a minimalist incremental game centered around time compression and resource propagation. Your resources build automatically over time, but their growth accelerates when you optimize their downstream flow ratios, and you can manually push them along to go even faster. Each action grants attributes that reduce the requirements of other actions, allowing you to push further. Eventually, you can head north to Fight the Lich's Forces in an automated Phase 2, gathering three vital resources that make your next loop faster and unlock new goals.
With each loop, you gain access to an expanding web of actions. Your goals and strategies will constantly evolve as you prepare for the ultimate fight. As you delve deeper into the system, the number of available actions scales to over 300.
As an idle game, the math takes center stage. Every formula is fully exposed so you can see exactly how to respond to it. A scrollable map with multiple zoom levels lets you step back and visualize the exact state of your complex network at a high level.
Your primary resource — Momentum — generates and increases automatically. Your core gameplay loop involves routing it in different directions based on your current objectives, whether that's boosting Momentum generation or unlocking new action nodes. With multiple secondary resources in play, choosing the correct directional flow is the ultimate optimization puzzle.
Designed to be played over weeks and months, this is a true idle game. You will frequently set up your flow logic and then step away to let the harvest play out, with new unlocks and hints keeping you engaged for the long haul. To ensure your time is respected, being offline or paused banks Bonus Time at 100% efficiency. You can spend this to multiply the game's simulation speed, ensuring no time is ever wasted.
As you play, you will unlock deep automation tools. These give you the ability to dictate exactly when and by how much your downstream flow dials shift, enabling complex decision-making tailored to your current stats and situation.
After a few hours of build-up, you can engage the Lich's Forces. This resets your current progress and pushes you as far as your build allows, rewarding you with resources to spend on a massive upgrade tree. The core strategy lies in selecting the most efficient upgrades to compress the timeline of your next run, allowing you to reach new heights faster!
To keep the progression and time compression flowing endlessly, the game features two distinct layers of prestige restarts, as well as a New Game+ with its own upgrades, for players who want a little more! Each reset layer is curated to continuously evolve the player experience.
Join the thriving Discord for bug reports, suggestions, or to brag about your progress!
Genres
Stats
Languages: English
Engagement
Reviews
Step 1: Set your system clock ahead a year, save the game, and turn on offline time speedup at 10x permanantly. Congratulations, you've made the game run at a playable speed. This game really is way too slow, running upwards of 6 hours on a standard prestiege, and it's not the sort of game where runs get exponentially faster from there. If anything, they tend to get longer as you unlock more stuff to do. Yes, it's an idler, but you don't *feel* the progress by the nature of runs being as far apart as they are and the changes between runs generally so marginal. Mechanically, it never feels like optimizing most anything is worth doing beyond the absolute minimum of 'turn on new paths, turn off paths to completed stuff', which gets automated after the first run. The nature of the main loop being on an exponentially growing generator means that any microoptimization that might save you a fraction on any particular action feels meaningless when the main overclock is running regardless. The real player choice comes in how to distribute the prestiege currencies into the many different upgrades. Here you actually have options and a look at the whole action map to see what attribute increases would translate into useful increases. I'll still end up at a positive impression, assuming you're playing the game sped up as you should be. It's an interesting enough optimization puzzle when you're running it fast enough to actually see the results of your actions without a day's intermission between them.
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Concurrent players on Steam, sampled daily since tracking started.
Hours played at review time, across 40 reviews with recorded playtime.
Game pace slows down wayyyyy to much. Soul coins are invisible until you stumble across them. Should pop up on the game screen in the UI when you have coins available for collection.
A nice and chill resource management game. i rather liked the story bits scattered around as they give you something to read while the systems tick in the background. if i had to change anything, maybe a floe direction indicator to help see which direction resources are going once the web gets bigger.
Idle‑стратегия с элементами симулятора (дата выхода: 14.04.2026). Оптимизируйте потоки ресурсов, настраивайте автоматизацию и проходите циклы престижа, чтобы в итоге одолеть Лича. Основной ресурс — Momentum — накапливается автоматически и направляется на разблокировку более 300 действий. Плюсы: минималистичный стиль и простой интерфейс — фокус на геймплее, а не на графике; глубокая система автоматизации процессов; более 300 разблокиваемых действий и улучшений; механика престижа: сброс прогресса ради бонусов в следующих циклах; система сжатия времени — ускорение прогресса после рестартов; работает в фоновом режиме: прогресс идёт даже при закрытии игры; бесплатная модель распространения; прозрачность механик — все формулы открыты, можно точно просчитывать стратегию. Минусы: монотонность на ранних этапах — поначалу геймплей может казаться однообразным; сложная система оптимизации: новичкам трудно разобраться в потоках ресурсов; упор на математику и расчёты, а не на визуальную динамику; отсутствие мультиплеера — только одиночное прохождение; медленный начальный прогресс без настройки автоматизации; часть продвинутых механик раскрывается лишь спустя десятки часов игры; внутриигровые покупки могут ускорить развитие. Итог: подойдёт любителям idle‑игр и симуляторов с упором на стратегическое планирование, математику и оптимизацию. Игра привлекает глубиной прогрессии и системой престижа. Идеальна для тех, кто ценит фоновый геймплей и любит выстраивать сложные схемы автоматизации. Не подойдёт тем, кто ищет динамичные действия, яркую графику или быстрый видимый прогресс без расчётов.
a fun take on idle games
the game crashes my pc to the lock screen whenever I close out of it. that's an unacceptable bug for any piece of software.
It was okay at first. Now it's just, open the game and minimize, fight the lich, close out. End game is boring
nearly no improvement after prestige
La cantidad de veces que vale la pena gestionar los recursos es minima, y se va reduciendo a medida que avanzas en el juego, practicamente jugandose solo.
Audience
Estimated from the language of this game's reviews — a proxy for where players are, not official Steam demographics.
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