The Best Idle & Clicker Games to Play in 2025

Waste your time in the best way possible!

This week I'm going over idle games, a request from my former roommate who commented on the reader feedback poll. Shoutout Muug.

As always WOW continues to be disqualified since I can’t get myself to sit through the tutorial.

I digress.

Idle Games and Clicker Games

If you're not familiar with what an idle game is:

An idle game plays itself. It's a game whose main motif is not the act of interaction, but the time between interaction. In this article we're going to talk about clicker games and idle games.

So, what’s the difference?

Clicker Games

Clicker games are idle games where the goal is to have a number increasingly go up as high as possible. Generally, this happens through the buying of upgrades which then automate your accumulation of said number. So, let's go ahead and get started.

Cookie Clicker

It would be remiss of me not to mention the progenitor and namesake of the genre, Cookie Clicker. Cookie Clicker tantalizes you on launch with a large appetizing looking cookie. Every time you click on the cookie you gain... one cookie. As you acquire cookies, they can be spent on bribing others to make more cookies for you. You start with your lovely grandma, and the grandmas of others presumably. Your cookie creation rate is measured in cps or cookies per second. The goal is to get your cookies per second up so large that your quantity of cookies outnumbers the number of atoms in the universe.

Despite being the first game in the genre, Cookie Clicker was not above subverting itself. Depending on your actions, you alter the fabric of reality in either good or bad ways. The end result is truly up to you, the cookie collector.

Melvor Idle and Melvor Idle 2

Oftentimes the line between regular games and idle games is blurred. This is especially true for MMO's, where your character tends to perform actions much longer than you yourself are interacting with it.

A fantastic example of this is the game Old School RuneScape. A multitude of activities in Old School RuneScape happen on their own, requiring no user input whatsoever. Certain activities, sand crabs, can happen for up to a half an hour long without requiring user input.

Melvor Idol asks... what if you took all that out? It turns RuneScape entirely into a clicker idle game, and to be honest it's probably one of the best in the entire genre. I've gotten early access to the sequel, Melvor Idol 2, and while I don't think I can talk too much about it, I can say that it pushes the game a long way in terms of quality and polish, and I think that it's really great. You can wishlist it on steam and I’m under the impression that it’s coming out ... soooon.

Faceminer

There's a reputation behind clicker games that they should last forever (most clicker games nowadays actually have an ending I realized when editing this, but I still think this is relevant). Metaphorically, this makes sense. Idle games are inherently capitalistic in their ethos of endless accumulation of wealth. See: Venture Capitalist

Just like in real life it really only stops when you decide it stops… or when you run out of supply. Either way, in clicker games, supply is usually not the issue and so the game tends to go on forever. That's why I appreciate games like Face Miner.

In Face Miner you play as somebody who signed up for a gig website that pays you to train an AI by distinguishing between faces and non faces. There are huge datasets of faces and all you have to do is sort through real ones and not real ones.

The narrative of Face Miner is about what happens as your operation expands from a home grown business to a fully-fledged corporate operation.

Your computer becomes a compound, you reroute rivers for cooling and pay off environmental tax credits for the rise in global temperature you yourself caused.

It takes on this idea of something that continues to grow without stopping and treats it more like what it is, a cancer. Then at the end it asks you that question, what if you stopped? How could you go back? If you're looking for a short clicker game, I definitely recommend Face Miner. It's really good and the aesthetic is awesome.

Idle Colony

Another clicker game I found myself really enjoying was a game called Idle Colony. The draw for idle games can come from many things. For some people it's about variety of gameplay. For other people it's about prestige and what you can get the longer you play. I am drawn to interesting concepts and unique visuals. Idle Colony ticked those boxes for me.

In Idle Colony your job is to run a small colony of fruit farmers that toss fruit into a big wok. When two of the same fruits end up in the wok they combine and become a bigger fruit. Your goal is to get the highest tier fruit possible. The upgrades in the game are unique, the art style is fun, and watching the fruits evolve over the course of the game is extremely satisfying.

Idle Games

If I may, I'd like to separate idle games from clicker games because I do feel that they are different in experience. I tend to think of idle games more as a simulation that you watch for fun as opposed to a clicker game where you're just trying to make a number go up. That's why I'd really like to separate the two into different lists.

I’ve loved idle games for as long as I can remember. I’d classify an idle game as a program where you set up initial conditions for a simulation and watch the resulting complexity unfold. I would call them simulation games, but that genre has become more about cars and construction. You can interact with the simulation sometimes as it runs, but most of the time you just enjoy watching it play out.

The first game on this list I want to mention is the oldest one by far.

Progress Quest

Progress Quest is a really old satire game about EverQuest that seems to question that line between MMO and Idle game I mentioned earlier. In progress quest you make an RPG character similar to any other MMO then hit start. The rest of the experience happens on its own.

Progress quest uses the aesthetic of a windows 95 installer begging the question if tasks you perform in Everquest, MMO’s or games at large, is any more than just watching loading bars go up.

As the game runs, your character does quests on their own, defeats monsters on their own and chooses their own upgrades. Outside of the obvious satire, I think the game does have its own staying power just in the fact that you accrue progress over time and the timeline of events indicates a narrative about the digital person running on your machine.

World Box

Another category of idle games that I really like are world simulation / god games. There aren't very many of these because I imagine they're very hard to make. The number one world simulation game out there is Dwarf Fortress, but let's be real, I'm not going to recommend that. And you can't even really watch the world simulation happen without wanting to read through days of Excel text. In lieu of that, I would recommend something called Worldbox.

World Box is a simulation idle style game where you generate a world and watch little things happen. You can watch civilizations run, you can have creatures evolve over time. You can watch great heroes create great weapons, and then when they die, those weapons get passed down. It's a very complicated system and it's a lot of fun to watch.

Final thoughts

I wanted to end this article with a statement on my thoughts of the genre. As interesting as these kinds of games are, I do feel like they've also been a problem. For example, management games like the old Lemonade Stand have had to compete with idle or clicker up games because they both satisfy the same kind of economic fantasy fulfillment. As a result, clicker games have almost completely absorbed management games like that. Secondly, the idle/world simulation game has had to compete heavily with clicker games as well which makes them harder to find. That’s not to say there aren’t great games being made in each genre, but I do wish there was a clearer distinction between the two.

Overall, though, I really like these genres and these games, and I think that the world of gaming benefits from having games where you can just sit down and watch progress happen, regardless of your flavor. I can't tell you how many hours I've left my computer running to see what happens on a game where basically nothing happens.

SEO Stuff

best idle games, top clicker games, best incremental games, idle games 2025, clicker games PC, idle RPG, Cookie Clicker, Melvor Idle, AdVenture Capitalist, WorldBox, AFK Journey, game recommendations