plusone weekly #21 (12/26/2025)
We made it back safe and sound from the hospital just in time for the holidays! Phew! Anyways, during that time a ton of nodebuster-likes I'd had my eye on released, so I took time the last couple days to play through them (and some others I just hadn't had time to play yet) and wanted to give small reviews here.
But before those, a quick reminder that this is the LAST week to participate in the https://plusone.incremental.social/survey!
I played https://store.steampowered.com/app/3767740/Outhold/, which was a lot of fun! I've been a fan of tower defense games since the flash days, and it's interesting to see it brought into the incremental game genre. There's an interesting design complication in that incremental growth makes strategy less important than it would be in a pure tower defense, and you can see vsrious tower defense games with meta progression (like gemcraft or blooms TD) handle that differently. Outhold used multiple currencies to do so, and in my playthrough I found that the "grindable" resources became increasingly less relevant towards the endgame and it became more and more about strategy, to the point where post-game even arbitrarily limited the amounts of currencies you could use, in a way reminiscent of C.H.I.M.P.S. challenges from bloons. Overall very fun, although those not interested in tower defense games for the strategy aspect may not find the post-game interesting.
I also played through https://store.steampowered.com/app/3694480/A_Game_About_Feeding_A_Black_Hole/, which was quite fun! A tad linear, but I found the core gameplay and visuals interesting enough (and new mechanics introduced regularly enough) that it was quite compelling. The team behind this game has also committed to implementing several different game modes, and I played through the beta for the rogue-like mode. I'll talk about the idea of rogue-like modes in incremental games more below, but I'll just say I think this one is likely a good deal away from being ready to leave beta, and I hope they don't stick to using a tree structure for the upgrades. But between that mode and the others either already released or planned, I think AGAFABH will certainly best a lot of nodebuster-likes in terms of replayability.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2467850/Wild_Growth/ was a fun game with a pretty unique core gameplay compared to other nodebuster-likes. It required a much different skill set than the others, with a bigger focus on micromanagement. It also allowed for quite a bit of theorycrafting with a large tree that you're not expected to fill out completely, so instead you're looking for strategies and focusing efforts there, alongside optimizing which characters to use and their placement. It kinda sped up towards the end, and had a satisfying final boss.
Unfortunately, one game I played was a fair bit disappointing, even for a nodebuster-like apologist such as myself. https://store.steampowered.com/app/4035270/Space_Rock_Breaker/ had a promising early game, but over time i found it to have severe pacing issues towards the end, a completely irrelevant prestige mechanic, and an anticlimactic ending. Unfortunately the core gameplay did not remain interesting enough once you get to around sector 25, where the difficulty curve tapers off and each set of 5 sectors feels the exact same.
Finally, I took a bit of time to explore https://store.steampowered.com/app/3503440/Astro_Prospector/'s new rogue-like mode. Honestly it is an interesting idea to combine nodebuster-like and rogue-like game modes in the same package. I like it as the solution to the complaint that nodebuster-likes are too short: suddenly it has replayability and unlocks that can go far longer than the nodebuster-like campaign. It might become even further removed from what someone who wants a "traditional" incremental game experience wants though.
Gosh, I've _really_ had nodebuster-likes on the mind lately. Perhaps I'll have to put that towards something productive... 🤔