stimulation clicker
5 august 2025
Incremental games, or "clicker games", are a favorite of mine. If there was a game genre I play the most, it's those. Cookie Clicker, Crush Crush, Blush Blush, and Clicker Heroes are all in my Steam library, and because I left them idle in high school, they sit at the top of my library for total play time.
But my current favorite clicker game is meant to be completed in less than two hours: Stimulation Clicker.
Stimulation Clicker is one of the many games available on Neal.Fun, a game website made by Neal Agarwal. It's a clicker game parodying the attention economy of the "content slop" period of social media we find ourselves in during the 2020s. You earn "stimulation" by clicking the button, then watching DVD logos bounce around, then adding animations. You unlock lo-fi beats. Subway surfers plays in the bottom right corner. ASMR slime crunches in the top left. It all plays at once, true crime podcasts and guided meditations and mukbangs and reaction streamers overlapping into pure noise where you can hear some words but it all bleeds into nonsense.
At some point, you unlock "powerups", and one of them shows the ocean. I found this annoying at first, but as the game went on, I came to appreciate the moment of reprieve before diving back into the overstimulating madness. This game consistently gives me a headache, and I love the experience. It reminds me that all this shit is designed to steal your attention, and when it's all playing at once, it really puts it all into perspective.
Is this it? Is *this* the internet now? Endless streams of stimulation, devoid of anything except finding the almighty interaction statistic? You talk to your own grandmother a total of twice in the game. The only other human you can be sure that cares about you, and you speak to her twice. I struggle with answering her immediately, because I love her. But I also know she wants an answer so, so badly. I answer anyway. I never hear from her again.
The final item you can buy is "Go to the Ocean". It stops everything. No more true crime podcasts overlapping with workout tutorials, no more wriggling lines of the stock market, no more Duolingo yelling at you to learn languages, no more of the Subway Surfers dimension.
I wait patiently for my number to hit 2 million, the price of Go to the Ocean. It's the longest seven minutes I've sat through in a long damn time.
I finally buy it.
It's quiet.
It's serene.
This is *art*. Agarwal hit the nail on the head with how stupid, overstimulating, and ultimately pointless the "content slop" period is. It's all loud and trying to get in your head, to steal what little attention span you can spare. It's the hyper-capitalist version of the toy shows of the 80s: nonstop commercialism and meaningless bullshit that people eat up because it gives them dopamine. It's everything seen in advertising - loud noise, saturated colors, higher and higher stakes, engagement engagement engagement - played at once. It's the unbroken id of capitalism. This is what would play in people's minds 24/7 if Fahrenheit 451 was made today.
I hope this stays on Neal's site forever. I hope it gets ported into a format that's playable offline. I genuinely believe this belongs in a museum, able to be experienced by people to show what the 2020s was like.
This game makes me want to go to the seaside, leaving my phone inside, and just... be alive.