Reactor Incremental
Hey, listen, that plutonium is MINE and it has been registered to be used for religious purposes!
Many years ago, as console juggernauts brawled, when system specs were paramount, and the great poisons ailing gaming were MMO subscriptions and two dollar horse armor, the true refuge of gaming passion was online… and played entirely from browsers. Repositories of Flash-based games, from Newgrounds to Armor Games, filled the most important niche of all, letting students waste time doing literally anything but pay attention in their classes. Long before mobile gaming revolutionized sitting on the toilet, a generation of gamers basked in an unending stream of utterly pointless distractions. Tower defense games, escape-the-room puzzle piles, obnoxious joke games where Mario pulls out a gun and shoots a koopa in the head and the koopa’s head explodes in blood and gore and then Luigi walks in all scared yelling MAAARIOOO~ like in Luigi’s Mansion but then he sees the koopa’s exploded head and screams HOLY SHIT MARIO WHAT THE FUCK?
Reactor Incremental is a clicker game [prove me wrong] where you operate a fission reactor inside a browser window. I was recommended this particular ‘incremental’ game after my Starvester write-up struck a nerve with incremental fans, who took umbrage at my continued reference to the genre as ‘Clicker’ games. Actually, there were a few suggestions, some of which might have been better, but RI seemed to be the simplest to engage with so I started there.
The reactor you manage is a large grid of tiles, upon which you can place a variety of single-tile components. Oh, hang on, getting ahead of myself, because first you have to click the ‘scrounge for cash’ button several times to scrape together enough money to buy your first fuel rod. Definitely dodging those Clicker allegations, then. Once you’ve started placing fuel rods, there are two things to manage – selling off the power you’ve generated, and dispersing the heat your fuel rods have released... by clicking a whole bunch. Selling energy is simple, but tedious, requiring you to click the ‘sell’ button to convert joules into dollars at a flat exchange rate. If you’ve got too many rods cooking, that bar fills up quick, topping out, and any excess power generated until you click ‘sell’ just evaporates and is wasted.
Heat is more complex – every fuel rod tier comes in three forms – single rods, double rods in one tile, and bundles of four rods, each producing more power and heat than simple multiplication, since their proximity speeds up the natural fission reaction. Placing any sort of rod in the grid dumps all the heat into your reactor’s ‘pool,’ which, like the power pool, must initially be emptied manually. Every click dumps some amount of heat out of the reactor, and if you fail to keep up, and the bar fills, every component in your grid explodes.
After a few minutes of juggling power sales, manual heat venting, and manually replacing fuel cells as they burn out, you’ll have earned enough cash for a few upgrades. Capacitors increase the reactor’s total capacity for generated power, giving you more time between sales. Heat vents can be placed alongside cells, automatically stripping generated heat out without it ever entering the reactor’s pool, while shielding can increase that heat pool. There are permanent upgrades to buy too – improved stats for various components, the ability to automatically sell a small percentage of your total accumulated power, better efficiency and lifespan of each element type, and even automatic restocks of burnt out fuel cells. Eventually, once you get enough capacitors and heat vents, RI shifts gears, going from a clicker game to a full-on idle game. Wow!
Your main mode of progress is getting enough money to afford the next tier of power generation, which pretty much means buying at least one each of the next tier of fuel cell, heat vent [so you don’t have to sit there spamming the manual heat purge] and capacitor [so you don’t have to sit there spamming the manual sell] which then starts producing enough power for you to build out an array of that new tier. Unfortunately, there’s really nothing distinguishing the various tiers besides color and significant figures. You simply climb a linear ladder, getting your vents boosted until you can surround one with single rods, then graduate up to double rods in another configuration, until you can manage to rebuild your core with as dense a block of quad fuel cells as your heat pumps can maintain, then sit back and wait until work on the next tier comes into grasp.
There are six color coded tiers of fuel available by default, and due to the scaling costs of permanent upgrades, the final tier is kind of unmanageable through normal means, just producing too much heat for any of your components to disperse without hours and hours of idle time at the penultimate tier. Right around then, though, you should have enough ‘exotic particles’ passively generated to prestige, resetting your reactor, your wallet, and all of your ‘permanent’ upgrades I mentioned before to square one, and spending your exotic particles in a separate, meta upgrade tab. Most of these upgrades are flat or exponential bonuses to specific components – doubling output of all power cells, doubling effectiveness of all heat vents, and so on. With a few investments in those, obviously, not only can you speed up climbing the ladder, you can break through the final tier of generic power cells and start playing with the handful of prestige-only components.
Of these, the most important are the new fuel cell types. Each one has a sort of gimmick or tradeoff – one type, for example, loses power generation for every grid tile occupied in a radius around it. The first prestige-only cell, protium, has a very short lifespan, but permanently improves the power generation of every other protium cell ever used in the reactor that run after it expires. After a few rounds of prestige purchases, it takes very little time to leapfrog your way up the standard tiers until you can start placing protium, and that’s about where I plateaued.
The game is pretty tedious and unclear about certain mechanics, like how heat and power generation is scaled based on fuel rod proximity, how heat dispersion and pumping works, and how exotic particles are earned. You can pause time to safely redesign your reactor, but if you don’t, you’re almost always a single mis-click away from an instantaneous reset, which, even if it doesn’t totally set you back to square one [you keep your current cash and semipermanent upgrades] can still be incredibly demoralizing as you have to rebuild, one tile at a time, your entire structure. It gets even worse if you pick up the sole exciting-sounding prestige upgrade, which physically expands your reactor, giving you more tiles to work with… except it doesn’t zoom out or expand the window at all. That means you have to right click and drag to move the screen around to access or even view some of your tiles, and God help you if you accidentally right click on and delete a load-bearing component doing that.
There’s a lot of mechanics bound up in heat management that seem important but wind up being superfluous – intakes that pull heat out of components and into the core, shielding to increase the core’s total pool before meltdown, outlets to pull heat out of the core and dump them into every adjacent component, pipes to redistribute heat, but only up to a certain threshold, and then… what? It all has to either go into the passive heat vents or the cooling cells that need to be constantly manually refreshed anyway. I screwed around trying to use the heat piping mechanics to support fuel cores hotter than I could manage with just passive vents alone, but it seemed to take up too much of the limited reactor space to be worth the tradeoff anyway, and it’s extremely finicky to work with, since upgrading your heat pipes or outlets, for example, can end up overloading everything else and triggering a meltdown.
I mentioned before that this is a browser game, and while I assume there is an offline version available somewhere, all I ever found were a host of knockoffs and clones. I believe I played the ‘original’ version from 2015, called simply Reactor Incremental, based off of the web host Kongregate, which worked fine… until I realized the reason I couldn’t figure out how to prestige was because of a banner begging me to turn off my adblocker, which was obscuring not only the button that gives you access to the prestige option, but also the bottom row or so of reactor tiles. Still better than giving anyone ad revenue.
I think the real problem I have with Reactor Incremental is that it just doesn’t do much with the concept, and ends up basically being a retread of the tier-climbing of Cookie Clicker. The heat management is really the only thing that felt like it mattered, beyond filling my screen with enough max-level capacitors to keep me from having to sit there cashing in manually, and even the heat wasn’t as complicated or deep as the array of heat management components makes it seem. There’s little reason to bother doing anything except progressing from surrounding a power cell with four heat vents, then stripping away excess vents as you can, until you’re instead surrounding a single vent with four cells, making the densest totally passive unit that you can. Everything just scales straightforwardly, and the things that don’t are either obscure or functionally pointless. There’s no ending, no goals, just a number climbing higher into increasingly silly -illions.
There’s a lot you could add to this, or rather, a lot of conspicuous dead ends. The whole conceit here is that you’re running a nuclear reactor, right? Why is there no radiation? You burn through thousands of fuel rods, and they just become completely neutral, greyed out outlines once expended, deleted and replaced without a thought. I don’t think there necessarily has to be an oppressive social commentary angle with you paying more and more exorbitant fees to find remote places to store your waste, but come on. There has to be some mechanic you could think of – enriching uranium rods, substantive differences between different fuel types beyond the mostly irritating prestige gimmicks, and so on. There are a few extra mechanics in the game you could possibly try squeezing more power out with, like a boost for keeping a certain level of passive heat radiating in your reactor, but it’s not really worth bothering with on top of maintaining your theoretical densest stack of cells and all the capacitors you’ll need to siphon that power away.
And it doesn’t even do anything interesting in the domain of ‘incremental’ games either. Again, the tiers are functionally identical, even the ‘bonus’ tiers locked behind prestige are pretty dull iterations, and the game has a terrible balance of required input and downtime. It switches between tedious tile-based building projects into full-on idle game ‘leave the tab open and let cycles cook away’ for hours before you’re ready for another round of engineering [and the engineering isn’t that deep or interesting] but guess what? The whole point of a browser game is to give me something to do while avoiding doing something else! If your browser game makes me… go find a different fucking browser game to kill time, why wouldn’t I just play that fucking browser game? Or, to twist the knife, literally anything else ever made, since I have plenty of free time and anything that can run a browser game at this point also has full access to four decades worth of game development. Hell, even in the heyday of browser games, I was more apt to slip an install of DOSBox on and play something GOOD.
Is Reactor Incremental among the best examples of the ‘incremental’ genre? If so, the situation is more dire than I thought. Is it a good use of your time and your computer’s processing cycles? God, no, no videogame is, that’s part of their sublime beauty. But is Reactor Incremental a satisfactory way to kill a few minutes, keep your hands and mind occupied in a way that can be hidden when you sense your boss or teacher angling towards line of sight to your monitor? Only for a few minutes every hour or so. And buddy, it’s 2026. You could actually have fucking Satisfactory up. As for me… hang on. *tabs over and replaces all my protium rods before tabbing back* I’ll play a couple more of these stupid things and then I’m done.
You can play Reactor Incremental, at least the version I played, at Kongregate.