Masters of Madness Incremental

In most idle games the automation is a factory. In Masters of Madness Incremental it is a congregation. Antiway Studios, a two-person team with a fondness for pixel art and H.P. Lovecraft, released it on iOS in February 2021: you are a devoted acolyte in a ruined temple, and every soul you gather is one coin closer to waking Cthulhu.

The studio's other promise is worth quoting in spirit: a fair, ad-free experience where all ads are optional and everything can be earned by playing. Community sentiment over the years has broadly backed that up, which in the mobile idle scene counts as rare enough to lead with.

What the loop feels like

You tap the temple floor and souls come loose. Soon the cultists, monsters and horrors you summon are harvesting for you, and the tap becomes a trickle, then a flood of souls per second. That's Masters of Madness.

Then you draw a sigil. Finger on glass, occult pattern, and a burst of power floods the temple while the Great Old One stirs one notch closer to awake. That's Masters of Madness.

Sigils, delirium and Ether

The systems stack in layers. Minions form the automation backbone, bought in tiers whose cost-to-output ratios are the real strategy. Occult sigils are drawn directly on the interface for temporary boosts to tap value or generation. Artifacts unlock unique abilities, and shrine idols decorate your dark temple with passive buffs tuned to your playstyle. A madness resource, delirium, sits over all of it: embrace psychological thresholds and higher tiers of power open up.

The prestige spine is ascension and transcension. Reset past a milestone, bank meta-currency called Ether, and push into a fresh timeline slightly more godlike than the last. The community's early-game guide from r/mastersofmadness treats the minion loop with spreadsheet seriousness: buy in bulk, align spending to roughly ten to twenty seconds of current idle output, skip mid-tier minions whose ratios have stalled, and keep the Soul Tap sigil active because it stays one of the most efficient Ether farms deep into the reset cycle.

Where it stumbles

Veterans of the genre are blunt that it does not reinvent the wheel: strip the Lovecraft paint and the loops are standard-issue tapping, buying and ascending. The mid-game slows before the quality-of-life and prestige layers kick in, and the whole thing sits lighter than automation-heavy web idlers like Trimps or Realm Grinder, closer to a few check-ins a day than an evening project. Early betas took balance criticism that the version 2.0 "Paths of Destiny" update set out to answer.

Playing it today

Both official versions are free: the App Store build and the Google Play release from Antiway Studios. A community wiki on Fandom documents the deeper systems if the temple maths starts to matter.

The verdict

An atmosphere-first idle that respects your time and your wallet, built by people who clearly love their source material. It will not replace a math-heavy web incremental, but as a twice-daily cult you manage from a phone, it is one of the better ones. Sigil up and check on Cthulhu.