I have played Cookie Clicker for 9 years, 268 days, and 23 hours.

That's 85,349 hours. I want to say that I've learned something during that time, but most of those ten years were spent with Cookie Clicker running happily in the background on my laptop while I went off and did other things. It's an idle game, so it doesn't mind being idle, but it does get boring after a while. That's where the endgame comes in: I have 620 of Cookie Clicker's 637 Steam achievements, 97% of the total, and with a few exceptions I don't plan on getting any more. After ten years, I have cracked the code on what this game truly is— an economy simulator, a nonsense machine made out of numbers where the goal is to chain as many game mechanics together as possible to achieve your goal. I find something special in the fact that Cookie Clicker updates so rarely. Ortiel seems like a fine guy, and I don't have anything against him for withholding the dungeons update until it's ready. Mostly. I have been waiting a very long time for it, but I'd rather get it once it's ready than act like I'm missing out. There's a magic to the way you have to wait for a very long time to see the structure of the game change, like it's begging you to stick your fingers into as many proverbial pies as possible, to push the game past its limits until those limits are finally expanded to let you back in.

Cookie Clicker is a game about economic numbers, and it is a game about abstract worldbuilding. Both of these things are Ortiel's forte. There's a genuine feeling of love in all the little upgrade and building descriptions, and there's a real sense of depth that comes from a game that has been in active development for a decade. You can feel Cookie Clicker's layers like a goddamn pastry as you play it, running your mouse cursor over all the little cracks and crevices. The most fun I've ever had playing Cookie Clicker was when they introduced the garden minigame, and I had to learn all of the little details about making it tick. That was something like five years ago, now, and the game has improved, but I would be hard pressed to tell you how it's gotten better. That's one of the pitfalls of developing a game for this long. When I think of Cookie Clicker, I think of layers, but I also think of everything collapsing into a big pile of slop. Some parts of this cookie are well-baked, and some other parts needed some more time in the oven. Hell, some parts have been in the oven so long that they've been burnt to a crisp. You kind of have to take the good with the bad, because it's such a jumble of complex systems that you need everything in its totality.

I can't even imagine starting a new save file, but not in the same way that The Binding of Isaac makes me dread every new expansion. Cookie Clicker is a rarity in the modern era of live-service games in that it maintains its entire history from top to bottom, with very few exceptions. If I started over, I wouldn't have to wait ten years to get back to where I was, because I have mastered many of the mechanics and use mods to help me along with the math— but I would still have to work very hard for a very long time, and that kind of commitment is why I'm sitting pretty on a ten-year save file. I don't want to start over because I like where I am. I don't want to push myself much harder because I think I'm going to like where I end up if I just let the game work itself out. I won't say that I trust Orteil— I have been burned by friendly game developers before— but I do think that I trust Cookie Clicker. I don't know Ortiel, but I know his game. That counts for something, at least.

If you're thinking of getting into Cookie Clicker for the first time in 2024, I wish you the best of luck. I won't try to dissuade you, and I won't try to convince you that there are other things you should be playing instead. This game is good, I believe that it's good, and I still can't recommend it, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. I hope that makes sense. I'll use a metaphor, in case it didn't: Cookie Clicker is a game that forces you to learn how to bake. You have to learn how to measure things, learn how to set up your oven just right, learn which ingredients are the most important and which don't matter quite as much. It's all about the learning process, and that might just take you ten years, even if the game itself doesn't take all that long to get you there.

I just don't know if you want to learn how to bake.