Arcane Incrementalist

Arcane Incrementalist is an occult incremental about the worst possible trade: you conjure spirits and demons into a magic circle, they pay you in Forbidden Knowledge, and every transaction puts a dent in your Sanity. Knowledge up, mind down. It is the incremental genre with a horror budget.

Luke, working as Deathray Games, built the original for Ludum Dare 37 in 2016 (theme: One Room, which explains why the whole game is a summoning room) and has kept refining it since, through version 0.7.0 with responsive mobile styling. Both official homes are live and current: itch.io and the developer's own site. The code is MIT-licensed and the art CC BY-SA, which puts it among the most open games in the genre.

What the loop feels like

You conjure a small spirit, it grants knowledge, and the knowledge buys a bigger summoning circle. The Infernal Chaos Toad barely dents you, and the early game feels like free money. That's Arcane Incrementalist.

Then the entities get names, and then the entities get opinions, and your Sanity bar starts mattering more than your Knowledge bar, because the thing paying you is also the thing unmaking you. That's Arcane Incrementalist.

The systems doing the work

Conjuring and binding is the engine: you invoke spirits and demons into a magic circle, and stronger entities yield higher ticks of Forbidden Knowledge per second while heavily penalising your mental stability. The Sanity meter is the twist, a genuinely subtractive resource in a genre of additive ones: your engine for gaining power actively fights your ability to keep playing, and if sanity bottoms out, madness stalls your progression entirely.

Grimoires act as the automated knowledge storage and scaling layer, while Foci stabilise the circle and let you run higher-tier entities without lobotomising your conjurer. The escalation ladder runs from the Chaos Toad through Phantom Lords and Moloch to cosmic heavyweights like Cthulhu, and the turning point comes when you unlock upgrades that flip net sanity generation positive, letting high-tier demons run while you actually gain sanity. Veteran advice follows from the math: do not over-greed early, invest in Foci before any tier jump, and let the thing idle through thresholds, because active clicking matters far less than keeping the ledger in the black.

Gameplay of the summoning loop.

Where it stumbles

The community's verdict splits cleanly. As a coffee-break oddity it delights; as a deep incremental it disappoints, because a 72-hour jam origin shows: players note it is quite easy to beat, with little late-game progression and no complexity to chew on. The recurring technical complaint is persistence: saving does not reliably work or was never built out, so progress does not stick across long sessions, and most players will finish or abandon it in one sitting. Neither flaw is hidden, and both are the honest price of a free, open, jam-born experiment.

Playing it today

Play it free in the browser at deathraygames.com or on itch.io, with source and assets on the GitHub repository. For a longer occult grind, the catalogue's other dark entries go deeper; for atmosphere per minute, this one is hard to beat.

The verdict

A one-room occult incremental with real atmosphere and a Sanity mechanic that gives every upgrade a cost beyond currency. It is short, it is fragile, and it does not care, because the point was never the spreadsheet; the point is watching your power source slowly eat you. One of the best horror-flavoured entries in the genre, and it is free.