Intro
Your Chronicle is probably the best text-based idle / incremental game I've had the pleasure of experiencing. Modernized, accessible, and actively-developed, this title is an easy recommend to any fan of the genre, and playable on your platform of choice across PC (Steam), browser, and mobile (iOS / Android). The developer Samurai Games continues to adjust and expand Your Chronicle to create a game that's compelling and interesting into the 100-hour and even 200-hour mark.
Screenshots do a notoriously poor job of representing what these kinds of games are all about, so I want to explain why Your Chronicle in particular is worth your time and attention.
Who This is For
Text-based incremental games are, self-referentially, for people who like text-based incremental games. They're distilled experiences with the frills of graphics and gameplay stripped away and in their place the timers, statistics, and math formulas are presented front-and-center. More specifically, Your Chronicle seems to be a game hand-crafted for people who have played and enjoyed other text-based or simple-graphics incremental games (and done so extensively): it feels designed for players that can intuitively catch on to its steadily-expanding list of mechanics tied to meta-progression. In return, the game hands you some powerful and much-appreciated quality-of-life features that makes Your Chronicle stand on the shoulders of other titles that preceded it like 4G's NGU Idle, Tukkun's Anti-Idle, and Gniller's Incremental Adventures.
This is the short version: if the above sounds genuinely exciting, you'll love Your Chronicle, are already downloading it, and know to stop reading this recommendation so as not to get spoiled on mechanics. If, conversely, a game about watching a window full of text, meters, and timers increment sounds boring, it probably won't appeal to you. If you're intrigued but confused, read on. I'll do my best to keep mechanical spoilers to the very, very early game. Just know that incremental games are all about the emergent experience of learning how game features work and interact with each other. The number of mechanics you have access to continues to balloon until what you're playing in hour 150 is completely unrecognizable from what you started with in hour 1. In the best moments of incremental games, you'll be operating on increasing orders of magnitude as your sense of power, progress, and scale continues to expand--and Your Chronicle lends itself to those best moments very well, arguably more often than some of its counterparts.
A Crash Course for Genre Newcomers
ℹ️ Skip ahead to the next section, What Makes Your Chronicle Special, if you're already familiar with incremental games. The following is a (sorta-)brief explanation-stroke-advertising-pitch for those who might have never tried or even seen the draw of these types of games.
"Incremental games", "idlers", and "clickers" are all sort of genre siblings with arguable overlap and no solid line that separates them. I would say that incremental games are the distilled forms of two kinds of fun:
- seeing number-go-up, and
- unlocking new features and mechanics that dramatically change how you play, or the scale on which you play.
Incrementing Numbers
A major draw of the genre is the constant feeling of progress towards massive-scale goals, and plentiful emergent moments of learning by theory or trial-and-error on how to optimize your play and reach progression or personal goals faster. Some of the best representations of the genre will boast massive spans of scale, allowing you to play with metaphorical twigs and dirt on an individual object-by-object basis, gradually scaling up to handling hundreds, thousands, and millions of those actions and tasks at once. The wider and deeper an incremental game's ambitious scope becomes, the harder it is to represent it with real-time rendered graphics. In games where 1e25 can be treated as a relatively small quantity used in real-time calculations, sometimes text and numbers are the only option.
For games that involve lots of numbers and math, you mercifully don't need to do a lot of math to play most of these games. In the same way that you can play Disgaea without a calculator at your side, incremental games don't need to be mercilessly optimized, spreadsheeted, and calculated in order to grant you the addicting feeling of real progress. Timer speed-ups feel tangible, efficiency doublers are obvious, and entire games can be navigated solely by gut feeling and intuition. Playing incremental games in a mathematically optimal way is not the single correct way to experience these games, and I'd venture to say that developers of these kinds of games don't expect that out of the majority of their playerbase, even with as many numbers and formulae as the games themselves involve. No, the simple joy of seeing numbers representing your objective progress towards a multitude of goals is present no matter how quick or slow your chosen pace is.
Incrementing Features
Incremental games are games of mechanical discovery. You start off with a relatively limited and approachable set of tools at your disposal, and use them to construct new features that make your existing tasks easier or grant you entirely new tasks that change how you play. To use another game from another genre as an example, Minecraft's early game.
You punch trees to get wood, which you use to make a crafting table and can serve as raw material for your first tools. Those tools will help you do your first sessions of rock mining, which grant stone and coal. You now have access to stone tools as an upgrade to wooden tools, but it also opens up smelting and torches. This opens the door to deeper cave mining, finding and smelting iron, and beyond. As the feature set expands, so do your options and ways to make these systems interact with each other. This progression is buttery smooth and feels great to experience each time, but especially the first time.
Incremental games will capture the magic of figuring this all out on your own, but extended into dozens or hundreds of hours in a steady stream of novel mechanics that bring new toys to experiment with. This is why incremental game players will typically mark and avoid spoilers as strictly as with story-based games--the discovery and learning process is itself the gameplay. When the answer to "this is all you do?" is a firm and resounding "you have no idea", you know you're in for a treat.
What Makes Your Chronicle Special
Welcome back, my header-skipping genre-familiar time-travelers! Hopefully now everyone's caught up on the basics of incremental games. We can now dive into the unique spice that Your Chronicle brings to the table.
I'd boil down the Your Chronicle elevator pitch to two key points: story and streamlining. Let's briefly dive into each.
The Chronicles
One of the main draws of Your Chronicle is, believe it or not, the story. Given to you in bite-sized pieces across the plentiful Actions you take to progress through the game, the storyline (or more properly, storylines) of Your Chronicle are a love letter to classic JRPGs and all of the genre trappings like adventurers, guilds, Demon Lords, and perhaps a sacred weapon or two. Beginning as an earnest, if a bit by-the-numbers reenactment of a classical JRPG, the story soon diverges into its own style, giving you branching storylines (called Chronicles in-game) with modest twists on familiar settings and story vignettes. Experiencing a run of Your Chronicle is oftentimes like rewatching a favorite comfort film, then watching the sequel that you've never heard about. Based in familiarity in the pillars of the genre, with some zest tossed in here or there to keep you on your toes every time you go for a different story path.
Speaking in too much more detail would spoil more than I already have, and the incremental discovery of the game's story, not just its mechanics, is one of the unique draws to the game that few others in the genre have captured in a similar way. For fans of SPACEPLAN or Little Inferno and how they handled story, you'll enjoy the same addicting "what happens next?" pacing with the added plus of new story paths to experience during your time with Your Chronicle.
This recommendation of story comes with a couple qualifiers. The first is that this is a slow-burner style of game. You incrementally unlock a little bit more of the story as you play, and sometimes might only be able to catch glimpses of an alternate story path or Chronicle on one run when your course is set for another. The second is that Your Chronicle is ultimately an incremental game first, and story game second. The longevity of this title lies primarily in the tight design and relaxing ritual of optimizing runs and gradually clearing new objectives for the first time, or old objectives with better and better results. Usually, more story is one of the most compelling rewards for stretching your long-run record a little bit more each time. But that means that you won't find a purely narrative-driven experience here, despite the reference to "text-based" earlier. There's a lot of text, but only about a fifth of that text is story-related.
Now, all of this isn't to put a damper on what I still view as Your Chronicle's main unique-selling-point, the eponymous Chronicles. I just want to set expectations that the moment-to-moment engagement with the game is going to the majority classical incremental game stuff, with the story being a significant but secondary bonus. Not quite "cherry on top" but perhaps "frosting on the cake."
The Quality-of-Life
It's hard to overstate just how easy-to-play Your Chronicle is. There are moments even 300 hours in that I'm blown away at how considerate the developer is in filing off the annoyances and rough edges that other incremental games struggle with by nature of them being very numerical, process-driven games. Plentiful tooltips and helpful statistical breakdowns make your decision-making easy and informed, while shortcuts and automation make it easy to perform actions as you like, forming a wholly different game depending on your progress.
I wouldn't be surprised if the dev(s) at Samurai Games have clocked thousands of hours in other incremental games, as the feature list of Your Chronicle feels exactly like my own wishlist for my ideal incremental game. If something feels laborious or difficult, chances are there's a way to make that task near-effortless through progress. Your Chronicle understands the core incremental game tenet of "making hard jobs easier" and runs with it in every facet of its design. My recommendation of Your Chronicle for everyone from experienced incremental game fans to newcomers to the genre has to come with the warning that the game will spoil you in how nicely it plays!
Incremental games in general often struggle with abstraction when increasingly complex (and oft-interacting) game mechanics are represented by little more than some text onscreen and a numerical value. While the text-based nature of Your Chronicle means you still have to use your imagination to visualize what a Ritual, Routine, or Converter might physically look like, the tooltips include just enough world-building info in them to make most of the mechanics and features feel like actual in-game objects or actions. We're gonna use the fancy word "diegetic" here because I think it's appropriate: meters and values that are essentially just parts of a few big math forumlas are presented as taking practice swings of your sword, eating anchovy sandwiches, or collecting stat-boosting Seeds. You still have to deal with how these ideas function together in the abstract space of numbers, but having some root in the physical world and with the comfortable flair of the JRPG adventurer helps keep things grounded and still approachable.
Ultimately, Your Chronicle is an easy-to-digest game which helps players learn by doing. Just like shapez and Satisfactory ramp up difficulty with gameplay that is cleverly and subtly tutorialized, Your Chronicle continues to up the ante with more and more complex gameplay while continuing to give you a light guiding hand throughout. You will rarely feel lost, although occasionally without guidance as the game opens up and leaves you to choose your own path to achieve some of the lofty, seemingly impossible overarching goals. And the beauty is, you're given all the tools needed to hit those goals all by your own efforts.
Some Brief Negatives and a Note on Monetization
This is a recommendation rather than a full in-depth review, so I don't want to pick apart all of the issues with the game. Doing so would by necessity spoil a large portion of the great things about it that you should be experiencing first-hand through the incremental gameplay. This is still a positive recommendation, but there are a few negatives that I'd like to briefly note here, to make this recommendation thorough.
- Lots of waiting. Some actions and timers feel too long for comfort, and it's tempting to cheat when playing actively just to keep up the pace.
- Even with all of the QOL, UI can be unintuitive.
- The tooltips usually do an admirable job of explaining the game, but sometimes things are left a little vague. You have to experiment to figure out exactly what some phrasing really means.
- Game can hang and/or crash when left idle for long periods of time. And you'll want to idle a lot.
- List menus can get very long and unwieldy over time, and organization tools only help that issue somewhat.
- Visual styling and color palette are nicely muted and features light and dark modes, which is nice and utilitarian. However, this results in a pretty sparse-looking game that lacks flair or character. You couldn't tell this is a game about epic adventures by the look of it. The current UI is nice for long sessions of number-crunching, but an alternate more visually-ornate look would be nice to have.
This following point isn't a negative per se but I'd like to bring it up to be informative. Your Chronicle is free to download and play, but is monetized with a premium currency for certain add-ons. This model is similar to that of NGU Idle and Incremental Adventures where the games are free to experience in their entirety, but players can receive some extra boosts if they decide to pay to support the developer. In Your Chronicle's case this takes the form of the freemium currency Rubies, which can be earned for free via drip-feed or purchased outright with real money. At the time of writing, there is no functional difference between paid and F2P-earned Rubies, and the entirety of the premium shop with the exception of the paid-only Starter Pack can be (slowly and eventually) earned for free. Your Chronicle additionally has a paid DLC that adds a few illustrations to the game, and is similar to "supporter packs" that other games feature where the intent is primarily to offer players a way to give money to the developer and receive a modest in-game bonus in return.
All in all, the monetization of Your Chronicle feels fair and unintrusive, and because Your Chronicle in its current state is a complete game on its own and is still being actively developed, I'm happy that there are multiple avenues for players to support Samurai Games in their continued efforts.
That last bit sounded like an ad-read, but I promise I'm not being paid by Samurai Games for any of this (otherwise I wouldn't have even mentioned cheating!), I just really like this game. And as a sometimes-obsessive player of other incremental games, this is really a stand-out in the genre that I hope more people can experience for themselves. Who knows, it might just become your next obsession too.