If you've never wasted days of your life to watching the numbers of cookies you're baking going up and up, consider yourself lucky. Many of us were sucked down that rabbit hole of browser based obsession over the past eight years, but now people are actually paying for the privilege. Cookie Clicker recently made its debut on Steam, offering a paid-for, ad-free version for $5 a pop, and already close to 50,000 gamers have stumped up the cash for that privilege of revisiting (or perhaps even experiencing for the first time) true baked hell.
Cookie Clicker was one of the first polished idle games, asking users to click a cookie a few times to make some more, only to then give them the option of automating the process. Macros and other hacks gave a quick boost to early production, but soon if you didn't have entire galaxies worth of resources pumped purely into baking cookies, can you really call yourself a baker?
The process was a devilish gameplay loop of baking more cookies so you could buy more cookie making equipment, and round and round you went. It has unlocks, prestige levels, one shot powers, and even a tech tree, all of which made that sweet cookie making progress feel somehow impactful, even if all you were ever doing is watching the numbers go up.
That might be all we're ever really doing with most games, but Cookie Clicker made it explicit. And it's still enjoyable enough to pay for, apparently.
If you want to suck a few days of your life away with a commercial Cookie Clicker experience, you can download it on Steam.