There exists, hidden behind the veil of modern digital marvels and forgotten in the dusty corridors of Steam’s library, a singular experience so profound, so exquisitely realized, that to describe it simply as a “clicker game” is to commit an injustice rivaling the desecration of the Sistine Chapel with a can of spray paint. I speak, of course, of Cookie Clicker, which is perhaps the most immersive, masterful clicker game in all of recorded human history, and arguably, in the countless eons yet to come. So please, read along with this review of mine, and you will see just how deep this rabbit hole goes.

Now, before the cynics tighten their monocles and scoff into their morning cappuccinos, allow me — nay, oblige me — to embark on a thorough exploration of this absolute masterpiece. Philosophically, Cookie Clicker is the exploration of human greed, obsession, and capitalism, traits of which humanity has fraught for years a thousandfold. Now at first glance, the game is offensively simple: you click a cookie, and you get a cookie. So be the first step into obsession. The genius of Orteil, the creator, lies not in the mechanical clicking itself, but in the relentless, Sisyphean momentum he imbues into each tap, each click, each desperate, sweaty pound of the mouse button. Now, the player starts small: a modest bakery, humble aspirations. "Perhaps," you muse, "a few dozen cookies will suffice." But once you begin, you cannot stop. “I’ll stop at a thousand!” you say, unbeknownst to the fact that you’ve already hit a trillion. Every click becomes a descent into a ladder you thought would ascend you.

You thought this ladder climbed upward into heaven, but no — it spirals, it twists, it turns inwards, it becomes a Möbius strip made entirely of cookie dough and poor life choices. Every new building unlocked — the cursor, the grandma, the farm, the factory — becomes another rib in this skeleton of human addiction. No longer are you the baker; you are the baked. You are the cookie. You are the dough, kneaded and stretched into something barely human. And now, this game begins to click…you.

And yet, you laugh. You chuckle at the absurdity. "How charming," you say, as you purchase your 500th portal to siphon cookies from another dimension. You pretend to be in control. That's the real kicker. Cookie Clicker doesn’t just mock capitalism; it doesn’t just parody addiction. It winks at you — a sly, golden cookie of a wink — as you spiral into the abyss of numbers so large they lose all meaning. Quadrillions. Sextillionduodecillions. You start making noises trying to pronounce them because the human tongue was not designed to articulate such madness. Our ancestors banged rocks together and now you’re buying a Time Machines so you can plunder the cookies of the future. Look me in the eyes and tell me that’s not art. I dare you.

And by then you’re baking cookies through alchemy and antimatter condensers and prisms of light that distort reality itself, and it doesn’t even faze you. Nothing fazes you anymore. Reality bends to the needs of the cookie. You ascend, rebirth yourself, dive back in, over and over and over, until all that remains is the clicking. The sacred, mechanical clicking. Are you a man? A woman? A child? A spirit? A series of frantic neuron firing in the desperate hope of another sweet, crisp bake?

Does it even matter anymore?

You start seeing the world outside the game differently. You look at your stove and think, “I could get a few thousand cookies out of that if I had enough grandmas.” You tap your steering wheel at a red light and wonder how much CpS you’re missing out on. You begin measuring time in the distance between golden cookies. Your dreams become a fever of buffs: Frenzy, Lucky, Building Special, Click Frenzy. You dream of wrinklers coiled around your subconscious, lovingly draining the very essence of who you once were. Eventually, you start seeing numbers in your dreams, symbols, equations on how to maximize your cookie production.

And when someone, some poor fool, dares to call Cookie Clicker "just a mindless idle game," you do not argue. You do not fight. You simply nod. Because some things cannot be explained to the uninitiated. Some journeys must be walked alone, one trembling click at a time. No matter how imaginary these cookies may be, you will not resist, for the human greed does not. You will click, and you will continue clicking, until you decide you’ve clicked enough. You will see shapes as cookies, and you will dream of them. Dream of having more. Wish to have more than what you had 5 minutes ago. And you will click and click and click…until everything around you dies.

That, or just use an autoclicker.