Journey to Incrementalia

Journey to Incrementalia hands you a necromancer, a mana orb, and 99 walls, and lets you work out the rest. Adam Travers' active incremental auto-battler is about summoning ever-larger armies of infernal minions and throwing them at physical blockades until the lost city of Incrementalia opens up. It launched on Steam in October 2024 to a Very Positive verdict, and the community's framing has been remarkably consistent: a tightly scoped, snappily written quest with a definitive ending, closer to a puzzle you solve than a number you babysit forever.

What the loop feels like

You hold down the mana orb, the skeletons pour out, and the wall's health bar starts moving. Goblin archers join them, spells arc overhead, and the army keeps battering the blockade without your hands. That's Journey to Incrementalia.

The wall breaks, skill points rain down, and the next wall raises its health, its defenses and its counter-attacks. You spend the points, the swarm grows, and somewhere around wall forty you notice you have been reading skill-tree branches like a build guide you are writing yourself. That's Journey to Incrementalia.

The systems doing the work

Mana and Orb Control is the spine: clicking or holding the central mana orb generates the resource that pays for spells and traits, and sustained channeling is markedly more efficient than frantic clicking. Minion Summoning and Management is the output: skeletons, goblin archers and their upgraded kin do the wall-breaking for you. Wall Breakthroughs structure the whole campaign, 99 blockades that scale in health, defenses and counter-attacks, each one paying out skill points for a hundred-plus-skill tree of minion buffs, spells and passive mana generation.

The signature risk/reward dial is the Corrupted Orb: invest mana into corrupting it and it exponentially multiplies magic damage and mana while auto-spawning lesser insect minions, a compounding engine you choose to keep feeding. Resets are tactical rather than mindless, since reallocating skills sacrifices your active army and restores the current wall's health. Side quests with your skeleton companion Bonesley dish out souls and unique items that power the late-game multipliers, and new game+ modes with prestige abilities stretch the arc past the first ending.

Where it stumbles

Build experimentation is fiddly: testing a new idea means a full skill-tree reset, a rebuilt army and a fresh wall, which discourages small tweaks. Despite the large-looking tree, a full run cycles through fewer genuinely distinct major builds than you would expect. Minor UI quirks persist, with side-quest panels occasionally misbehaving at certain screen sizes, and some players feel the final stretch of walls stretches the core mechanic thin before the credits. It is a five-to-ten-hour game, and it behaves like one.

Playing it today

Live on Steam for Windows as a single-player purchase, with Steam Cloud, trading cards and Remote Play Together, and no mobile version under the same developer. The community's most-cited comparison is no accident: players repeatedly place it beside (the) Gnorp Apologue as a spiritual peer in the threshold-smashing genre. If you want your swarms bigger and your idle loop longer, Swarm Simulator goes the other direction entirely.

The verdict

A whimsical, finite, active incremental with real mechanical teeth. The corruption dial gives the back half genuine build decisions, the writing keeps the grind light, and the ending is real: you break wall 99 and the city opens. Play it for the weekend it asks for, not the months it does not.