Swarm Simulator

You begin with some meat and a few larvae. Spend the larvae on a drone, and the drone converts meat into more meat, forever, without another click from you. In 2014 a developer called kawaritai put that loop on a single web page under the name Swarm Simulator, and a meaningful slice of the incremental genre has been chasing its curve ever since.

Nothing about it looks like a game. It is columns of numbers with a grey sidebar, closer to a well-organised spreadsheet than to anything with sprites, and that is the joke working as designed.

What the loop feels like

Your drones harvest meat. That's Swarm Simulator.

Your queens hatch drones without being asked, and your nests hatch queens, and your greater queens hatch nests, and each tier of the family tree quietly staffs the tier below it. That's Swarm Simulator.

Then you buy one more drone than your hatcheries can support, and the whole structure starves, and you learn the undo button exists for exactly this moment. Also that's Swarm Simulator.

More than one kind of number

Meat is only the front door. Lava feeds elite unit variants, territory gets captured by combat units such as Stingers and Locusts to make room for more hatcheries, and Energy pays for time-warps and spells.

The cascade is the famous part: every unit tier generates the tier below it, so production compounds exponentially even while the tab is closed. The undo button, a genuine rarity in this genre, exists because one mispriced purchase can set a cascade back an hour.

When growth finally slows, you Ascend: the colony is sacrificed for Mutagen, a permanent currency spent on evolutionary traits that make the next run faster and stranger.

Raz Games reviews the original web version.

Two swarms: the original and Evolution

There are two games wearing this name. The 2014 web original is the pure text-and-numbers version, still free at swarmsim.com, and it is the one the genre remembers fondly.

Swarm Simulator: Evolution, a remaster by ScaryBee, adds 3D graphics and its own systems, Golden Bugs, Elixirs, Swarm Lord invasions, and ships on Steam, iOS and Android. It also carries the loadout the remake is known for: microtransactions, premium time-warps and ad gates, with a progress wall that arrives just before the first Ascension.

The community consensus splits the same way. The r/swarmsim crowd treats the original's clean curve and UI as genre-defining, while Steam reviews of Evolution are where the monetisation complaints pile up. Both things are true at once, which is why this entry points at the original first.

The 3D remake lives on Steam if you want the visual version, and the free original needs nothing but a tab you are prepared to never close.

The verdict

Play the original. It is the archetype that half the genre's unit-cascade designs descend from, the pacing is still immaculate, and it respects your tab the way few idlers do: numbers rise while you are gone, and nothing is for sale when you get back.

Somewhere past the septillions you will notice the unlock list has quietly become a space programme. That's Swarm Simulator.