PetriDish

PetriDish is the agar.io-style cell-growth game at petridish.pw, live since around 2016 and still running: you spawn as a small living cell in a shared petri dish, eat pellets and smaller players, and grow until you are the thing everyone else is running from. It sits in this index as the incremental-adjacent entry, because a growth curve you can watch climb for hours scratches the same itch, even though nothing here prestiges or multiplies. Disambiguation note, because the name attracts lookalikes: this is not the itch.io gamejam pet simulator, not the cellular automata prototype, and not Cell: Idle Factory Incremental.

What the loop feels like

You eat a pellet, the pellet becomes mass, and the mass hunts smaller cells. Early on you are prey, weaving between blobs that could swallow you whole, skimming the safe edges of the dish and hoovering pellets while you plan. The first meal of a real rival is the moment the game flips: you feel the mass land, your reach extends, and suddenly the small cells are avoiding you.

The endgame is territorial. You join a clan, the PvE and PvP modes give your appetite structure, and the leaderboard turns the dish into a slow-motion food chain with you somewhere in the middle of it, for now. That's PetriDish.

The systems doing the work

The growth system is the spine: mass eaten becomes size, size becomes speed and reach, and the exponential feel comes from how much more dish a bigger cell can eat per minute. The multiplayer layer is the multiplier, because every other cell is a food source or a threat, and the balance between farming pellets and hunting players is the only real skill test. Clans give it persistence, PvE and PvP modes give it shape, and the leaderboard keeps the growth curve competitive rather than solo. It is growth as spectacle, stripped of the number screens its incremental cousins live in.

Where it stumbles

The servers are verified operational, but the research note says the quiet part: population is likely low, and an agar-style MMO with empty tables is a food chain with no prey. The genre also shows its age here, since the eat-and-grow formula has been done bigger and glossier elsewhere, and this entry offers clans and modes rather than depth. And honestly, it is not an idle game: leave the tab closed and your cell is dinner, not a passive income stream, which limits its appeal for readers who came here for overnight progress. No dedicated criticism survey exists for this entry in our archive, which is the flagged honest gap.

Playing it today

It is free in the browser at petridish.pw, with a Windows client on itch.io and a listing on Google Play under the pw.petridish id. For growth loops that do run while you sleep, Bacterial Takeover and Syntheticell Bioclicker take the same petri-dish fantasy incremental.

The verdict

A solid agar-style clone with more structure than most: clans, modes, a real client, and a growth loop that still delivers the flip from prey to predator. Include it for the growth-loop fans, with the population caveat stated plainly rather than papered over.