Incremental Cubes

Incremental Cubes opens with a single promise: cubes fall, you collect them, you buy upgrades so cubes fall faster. That is the whole surface, and the game knows it. Idle System, Inc. released this free Windows title on Steam in 2021 with the tagline 'simple but very deep', and the depth is real, it just arrives in phases. What starts as a one-screen collecting toy gradually grows helpers, boss fights, challenge modes and a prestige layer, until the falling cubes are the least interesting thing on screen.

What the loop feels like

Cubes drop, you hoover them up, an enemy waits at the edge of the screen. That's Incremental Cubes.

You buy a faster tick, a stronger attack, another tier of cube, and the board starts filling by itself. That's Incremental Cubes.

You hit a wall, reset everything, and come back with a fat stack of skill points to spend on a tree that makes the next run absurd. That's Incremental Cubes.

The systems underneath the cubes

Three named systems carry the depth. Cube Tickers are the speed regulators that decide how fast each tier of cube spawns and processes, and every cube has its own upgrade that shortens the interval, so the upgrade screen is really a fleet of timers to compress. Phases gate the whole campaign: progression moves through numbered phases with milestone bosses whose health jumps exponentially, and the community guide's core advice is that you balance raw collection power against attack damage, because bosses are how you earn skill points and how your current cube evolves into a larger one. Prestige is the third leg, wiping your run in exchange for points spent on a 3D-style skill tree, plus Helpers who automate attacking and collecting once you have pushed far enough, and a Challenge mode that pays out super bonuses for clearing its hurdles. Higher tier cubes then re-price the entire economy, pushing you from broad collection into targeted farming of the most valuable tiers.

Where it stumbles

The community feedback is honest about the rough edges. Late-game boards with massive cube accumulations can lag hard, a complaint that dates back to the prototype feedback threads and never fully went away. Balancing is erratic in places, with some upgrades granting mathematically negligible boosts, which makes parts of the grind feel unrewarding. And several mechanics lack bulk-upgrade options, so you are stuck clicking through purchases one at a time in a game that otherwise wants to automate itself. None of these are fatal, all of them are noticeable. The overall Steam verdict sits in mixed or lower territory, which tracks with a free, prototype-flavoured game that will delight a specific kind of player and baffle everyone else.

Playing it today

Free on Steam, single-player, Windows only. No mobile or browser version verified under the same developer, so treat any lookalike app store listing with suspicion. Mouse only, no keyboard required.

The verdict

A free, five-minute-to-install sampler of classic incremental structure: tickers, phases, bosses, prestige, automation, in that order. It lacks the polish of the genre's heavyweights but the underlying math is genuinely sound, and the price of entry is nothing. If you want the same bones with more presentation, Cauldron wraps a similar exponential grind around actual minigames and a story, and Pomofarm is the lighter, cozier counterpoint.