Drowning in Problems

Drowning in Problems is what Markus Persson made after Minecraft made him one of the richest people alive, and it might be the most honest thing he has ever shipped: a free browser game, written in a weekend in April 2014, where the entire mechanic is clicking Solve on problems that start at 'There is nothing' and end at death.

It is a game about a human life rendered as a resource ledger. You are born with nothing. You click Solve, and problems arrive: being a baby, being a teenager, having money, having too much money. The game is finished, and it is dark, and it is free at game.notch.net (verified live, played to the toddler stage during this entry's research pass).

What the loop feels like

You solve a problem, the problem gets worse, and you solve it again. That's Drowning in Problems.

The stages stack up the way ledgers do. Solving one problem funds the next, the problems grow as the numbers grow, and the toddler you were nurturing becomes a teenager with costlier troubles. Each stage of the life arrives as another row in the ledger, another Solve to press, until the ledger itself is the biography. That's Drowning in Problems.

Why it matters

The clicker genre's most credible author made its most credible satire, then moved on. Almost Idle calls it complete, and the fan video in the research file is the only moving record. The opening screen says the whole thesis: there is nothing. Solve.

The verdict

A five-minute masterpiece of the genre: free, finished, and bleak in the way only a resource-management game about being alive can be.