FACEMINER Review
Play it before the planet burns
I’ve played through a lot of idle games recently. It’s something I do when I get in a gaming rut. I can’t decide on something to play, but my brain desperately craves watching numbers go up. So I’ll hop on some of the newest idle games and give them a shot.
What is an Idle Game?
An Idle game is what the name suggests. It’s a game you play by mostly not playing it. In an idle game, your goal is to: “make number go up.” You do that by clicking something until you have enough of it, that you can get some other thing to do it for you. Now you’re collecting one a second.
The longer you keep playing, the higher your “thing per second” value gets. The ‘challenge,’ if it can even be described as one, is figuring out which thing to buy to get you the most benefit.
Unlike other games, the core resource at play is your own time.
Costs for items scale up logarithmically; something that costs 10 will jump to 1000 in just a few purchases. The puzzle for the player is figuring out what order of upgrades will prevent them from having to leave the game running overnight (which they’ll do anyway).
What is Faceminer?
Faceminer is an idle game! There’s a shocker. You play as a late-90’s computer enthusiast verifying face datasets for AI training. You log in on your sick Mac II, get some cool beats playing on your media player, and start earning cash by just clicking on faces.
Not long after you start, you’ll have enough cash to purchase an experimental program that clicks on faces for you. Your active income just became passive. How cool. What’s not cool is how much computing power the program needs. You’re running a PC from the late 2000’s, not an Intel i7 4GHz processor with 64 gigs of RAM. You’ll need to spend cash to upgrade your PC. The more components you add to your PC, the hotter everything gets, so you’ll need to purchase cooling. Now that you’re using more electricity than your entire neighborhood combined from Facemining—definitely not bitcoin mining—you’ll also need to invest in electrical infrastructure. You can see where this is going, hopefully.
The thing about Faceminer that I really respect is the fact that it has a story, and even rarer, an ending. Faceminer had me hooked for two and a half hours, then it let me go. If you don’t game, that might seem like a lot, but other idle games don’t have an ending. They expect you to play the game for weeks. So thanks for that.
The story is also pretty good. It’s not a traditional story, but one through context.
Let me explain.
One of the first programs you unlock is a chat window. You can see the other ‘Faceminers’ talking to each other and raving about how much fun they’re having. “It’s so much fun to have this for side income,” some say. While others are just happy to be a part of the community.
As your operation grows, the mood shifts. The chatters start gatekeeping what it means to be a Faceminer and suggest anyone not taking it seriously should quit altogether.
When you started, you were just clicking away at your personal computer, but now your operation is the size of an Amazon warehouse. Just like an Amazon warehouse, you somehow end up making everyone’s lives worse for seemingly little gain.
At the end of the game, keeping your system cool becomes a massive issue. Everything costs electricity, even the cooling systems, and the cost of all the coal generators you need add up. It seems like no matter how many coolers you throw at the problem, it never goes away.
Then, out of nowhere, a global heat index pops up on your task manager. Global temperature is rising rapidly, and environmental advocacy groups are not happy about it.
They claim that your operation is causing the global temperatures to go up, and at the very least, there is some correlation. If I’ve learned anything from living in a late-stage capitalist world, it’s that the best thing you can do in this situation is throw money at the problem, say you’re doing something, and don’t change anything. So I just buy tons of “environment credits,” which don’t seem to do anything, but it keeps the tree geeks off my back.
The Faceminer chat is split between those who think they should stop and others who want to push the world into some sort of heat-induced rapture.
So me being me, I shut down my whole operation, invested all my money into planting trees, and quit the game with billions still left in the bank.
That was my ending. I actually just closed the game and stopped Facemining. It seems like the game does have multiple endings, but I’m perfectly satisfied with mine.
So anyway, Faceminer is a chill idle game with absolutely no political themes whatsoever and a great way to spend two and a half hours.
