Short incremental games have become something of a trend. And I do like them! They catch me in a way that long-timeline idle games just don't. And because they're cheap, it's not difficult for them to be reasonable from a Dollars Per Hour perspective. So in that sense, Meeple Incremental clears the threshold.
The thing is, not all hours are created equal. And I would not say that Meeple Incremental delivers particularly *good* hours. You do get a consistent drip feed of upgrades to buy and relics to gacha for--and a lot of these are even unique upgrades! But because you don't actually engage with the game beyond Buy Upgrade, they all blur together into Upgrade Soup.
The short version is, it's just not really worth your time.
The LONG version:
Your central mechanic is the titular meeples, which move around the main game board based on dice rolls, and collecting money based on where they land. You know monopoly, you get the idea. At first you start with one meeple, and the dice rolls are manual. Pretty quickly you'll automate the dice rolls, which is an entirely reasonable design decision. You'll also get more meeples, which are separately automated.
That is the full extent of the core system. It never evolves past this. You'll upgrade the value of spaces, yes. You'll increase the speed of automated dice rolls, of meeple movement, you'll unlock strange bonuses for rolling doubles, or for dice colliding with each other, for meeples passing each other, and so on. You will notice *none* of this, because it's happening automatically, repeatedly, rapidly, across too many meeples to track. It purely boils down to Number Go Up Faster.
Alright, but there's the minigames as well, right? Well, yes. These are your primary method for getting skill points and the tickets you use to gacha for relics. You will engage with a given minigame for maybe five minutes, if that, before you automate it and never play the minigame again. They all have their own small skill trees--half of the skills are identical across trees, and the other half may as well be the same, because, again, you have automated out your involvement. They have no inputs, and identical outputs. They are functionally identical, besides the fact that you'll be *most* miserable trying to play Ball Toss before you automate it away.
The skill tree, as I've said before, ends up functionally being a bunch of functionally identical boosts, with the small exception of getting access to upgraded relic gachas. Which is to say, they pull from the same pool, but at better odds of the higher rarities (common can pull common to legendary, rare can pull rare or legendary, legendary only pulls legendary relics). These relics have different bonuses, but these are to the effect of "Red Spaces Give 200% More Money". Hooray. Number Go Up Faster.
The game has no standout moments, no shakeups, no paradigm shifts, no engines. You never *really* feel like you're getting anywhere. And then you reach the end, and you're given the option to Prestige! And there's bonuses you can select, but none of it is *actually* new content. And the run itself is going to be exactly the same as before, but Faster This Time.
I guess I'd imagined, that a game called Meeple Idle would care more about the Meeples, you know? That there'd be some big expansive Mario Party or Dokapon Kingdom board that you're directing meeples around, or... I don't know. *Something* more. But... it's a circle that produces money. That's all it is.
You can do worse for your money, but there's so many better uses for your time.
