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Everybody has a terrible gaming secret, and here is mine: for the past few days I have left Clicker Heroes running on my work PC overnight. Setting aside the environmental guilt I feel for this, which is considerable, this is also something of a very mild existential crisis to take into account. Clicker Heroes is one of the most openly inane games I have ever played. It is if a rent had opened up in the planet, connecting us with our collective gaming id, and a torrent of gold, of DPS, of levelling stats has spewed forth. Clicker Heroes is a game reduced to very little but its reward system. I should know. During the time I have been typing this paragraph, I have made over a billion gold coins.Clicker Heroes is one of those Cow Clicker, Candy Box type games where you sit and watch as the numbers go up, occasionally leaning over to the keyboard and mouse to nudge the numbers up even faster. We're in action RPG territory here, at least we would be if there were any real territory to consider. Cartoonish monsters appear on your screen, one at a time, and you despatch them by clicking away at them. They drop coins, and you can spend the coins on buying new heroes who will join you, adding to your attack power. That's it, more or less. The monsters repeat and new strains are added over time. You get a boss every five zones. There is an achievement for reaching zone 3,000.
Here is the thing, though: look beneath the surface and everything starts to get weird. Take the second word in the game's title: do you really feel very heroic doing all this? It took me a while to realise that, while my enemies had a health bar that was whittled away with each swipe, I did not: nothing in this game can fight back; the most it can do is present a health bar so long that you can't hack through it in a set amount of time - and it's only the bosses who even get a timer anyway.
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