Incremental Adventures

Incremental Adventures is a dungeon crawler that plays itself, and Gniller wants you to stop pretending otherwise. Combat is fully automated, turn by turn, hero by hero; your entire influence is upstream of the fight, in how you build the party, tune the automation, and decide when the whole machine resets. It spent its first life on Kongregate, crossed a million game-plays there, then arrived on Steam as a free, platform-agnostic incremental with a Mostly Positive verdict from hundreds of reviewers who mostly agree it is strictly for genre veterans.

What the loop feels like

Six heroes grind a dungeon, the combat log scrolls, and the numbers get quietly enormous. That's Incremental Adventures.

You nudge an autobuyer, move a prestige threshold, and the machine runs a little cleaner overnight. That's Incremental Adventures.

The party is a spreadsheet

Classes are not chosen, they are grown: pour stats into HP and armor and a warrior crystallises, pump damage and you get a ranger, so party composition is pure stat allocation across up to six heroes. Three prestige systems sit layered on top of each other, higher tiers resetting the lower ones, which is where the long-game strategy lives. The game's own pitch of unfolding mechanics holds up: new systems arrive gradually and force re-evaluations of your setup rather than dumping everything in tutorial one. Automation is first-class, with customizable scripting of stat priorities and reset thresholds so the loops run while you sleep, and offline progress is fully simulated. The numbers do not stop at scientific notation; double exponents are explicitly on the menu.

Where it falls short

The community's loudest complaint is a low ceiling: the game shifts from text-based RPG adventure into a pure exponential math grinder fairly early, and it never really goes back. Important systems, time manipulation among them, are barely documented, so there is a trial-and-error discovery phase that frustrates newcomers. And there is no dressing at all: no graphics to speak of, no sound, a dashboard of text and numbers. One Steam reviewer called it the most synthesized idle experience around, boiling the numbers game down to its essentials with no frills, and read that as both the review and the warning label.

Playing it today

Free on Steam, Windows, macOS and Linux, single-player, with optional purchases that exist to support the developer and never to gate milestones. It is an unusually clean free-to-play story: the game is tested and balanced around a zero-dollar run.

The verdict

If what you want from an idle game is raw engineering, layered prestige math with zero decoration, this is one of the purest distillations on the storefront. For more of that lineage, Antimatter Dimensions takes the layered-reset mathematics further, and NGU Idle wraps a similar depth in considerably more personality.