🧙 **A Slower Incremental Where Gathering the Resources Is Half the Fun**
I've now completed **Click Mage from beginning to end, earned 100% of the Steam achievements**, and after around six hours with the game, I've come away thoroughly satisfied with the experience.
Click Mage very much clicked with me. 😜
You play as the apprentice of a famous mage who has rather inconveniently found himself teleported to a remote island with practically nothing.
Getting home isn't going to be as simple as waving a wand and shouting something magical.
Instead, you start gathering.
And gathering.
And then gathering something else because you've discovered that the thing you actually wanted requires three other things first. 😂
Click Mage describes itself as an incremental game, and it absolutely is one, but there's a surprisingly strong **resource-management game** sitting alongside it.
You begin with very little and gradually establish yourself on the island. Resources can be gathered, stored and processed, while a trader provides access to blueprints that allow you to construct useful new buildings and devices.
Those new facilities then open up further possibilities.
Basic resources become processed resources.
Those resources help create more complicated things.
You need somewhere to store all of those things.
Then you discover something else you want to build.
Which requires another resource.
And suddenly you've created yourself a rather lovely little production problem to solve.
**That's the part I particularly enjoyed.**
This isn't an incremental game that's desperate to shower you with upgrades every thirty seconds.
Click Mage is considerably slower paced.
Progress feels deliberate, and there's a noticeable amount of grinding involved from surprisingly early in the game.
Normally, describing something as *slow and grindy* doesn't sound like I'm doing a particularly good job of recommending it. 😂
But strangely, neither bothered me here.
The pace fits the game.
I'm stranded on an island starting with practically nothing. Gradually gathering what I need, unlocking another blueprint, constructing something useful and becoming a little more established makes that progression feel earned.
There's also a story developing alongside everything, giving you another reason to keep moving forward beyond simply making the numbers bigger.
And importantly, I thought the balance was good for the vast majority of my playthrough.
There were certainly periods where I needed to concentrate on gathering particular resources, but for most of the game I wasn't sitting there thinking:
**“Oh, just give me the thing already.”**
Instead, I was normally thinking about what I could work towards next while gathering what I needed for the current objective.
That's an important difference for me.
I don't mind grind when I'm still engaged with the process. I mind grind when I've effectively finished playing and the game is simply making me wait.
Click Mage kept me on the right side of that line for almost the entire game.
The **final hour was definitely the grindiest part**, but even then it didn't feel evil or artificially stretched out.
By that point I knew what was left to accomplish. I knew what I needed in order to finally escape the island, and gathering those remaining resources felt like the final push towards something I'd spent the entire game working towards.
So yes, there was some waiting.
There was some grinding.
There may have been an increasingly suspicious amount of staring at resources. 😂
But because I understood what I was working towards, I was fine with it.
My one genuine disappointment came **right at the end**.
After spending the whole game gradually working towards escaping the island, I would have liked the actual ending to have a little more weight to it.
It felt somewhat anticlimactic.
It's not a major problem and certainly doesn't undo the enjoyment I had getting there, but after several hours building towards that particular moment, I think the game deserved a slightly more satisfying final send-off.
That's really my only notable negative.
Click Mage also isn't necessarily going to suit every incremental fan.
If your favourite part of the genre is instant gratification — enormous numbers, constant upgrades, rapid prestiges and systems exploding into existence every few minutes — you may find this one frustratingly slow.
But if you enjoy **resource gathering, resource management, production chains and steadily building yourself up from almost nothing**, its slower pace becomes part of the appeal.
That's certainly how it worked for me.
I started with virtually nothing.
Several hours later I had built an entire little production operation, followed the story through to its conclusion, finally achieved what my stranded apprentice had been working towards and watched that final Steam achievement pop.
**100% complete.**
And I sat there afterwards feeling satisfied with the journey.
That's ultimately what I wanted from Click Mage.
It isn't trying to overwhelm you with spectacle or turn you into an incremental god producing numbers with thirty-seven zeroes after them.
It's a smaller, slower and much more methodical progression experience.
Apparently being magically teleported somewhere with no resources, no established home and several hours of manual labour ahead of me is still my idea of a good time.
**Incremental gamers really are a strange bunch.** 😂
💜 **Tom Recommends**
Particularly for incremental fans who enjoy resource management and don't mind taking their time.
If you're looking for instant gratification, approach with a little caution.
If the thought of slowly turning **nothing into something** makes your incremental brain happy...
🧙 **Click Mage is well worth your time.**
