I have played over 80 hours of Horripilant. At the risk of sounding like one of those Steam reviews: I'm not sure if I like it! I don't think I do.

Horripilant self-describes as an idle/incremental dungeon crawler, inspired in part by Plastiboo's Vermis I, a grimy art book for a nonexistent video game. There are puzzle elements, too, but like each of Horripilant's many different moving parts, I personally found them to be oversold.

I think where Horripilant struggles most is also where it would be the most apparent, because it's the core concept — it just can't marry the idle gameplay with the RPG and dungeon crawling elements. Generally, dungeon crawler gameplay involves preparing to and then advancing through each floor of a semi-randomized dungeon. Usually, this preparation involves considerations of character build, equipment, and spells; purchasing of consumable items; and, in party-based dungeon crawlers, planning of party composition. But, because Horripilant is a single character incremental game, it has very little of this. You play as one knight-style guy with no classes, spells, or interchangeable or new equipment to speak of.

The incremental elements also, by design, create an arms race against exponentially spongier damage sponges. These ideas together mean that the majority of stats in the game feel pretty meaningless, as do their corresponding upgrades for the player character. Because both enemies and your character attack and defend automatically, and especially because enemies cannot heal themselves, there's no meaning to their having any different mixture of health, defense, or evasion. They all amount to increasingly beefy punching bags with different sprites. This does mean you can get a bit unlucky, like if a brand new (and therefore bigger-numbered) enemy shows up more often than you expected once introduced. However, because health and damage pools rapidly balloon into the thousands and then millions, and, again, because everyone automatically and mandatorily performs identical attacks, neither encounters nor dungeon runs are won with meticulous, per-attack planning. The enemy composition on any given floor is almost inconsequential past your first couple of runs. And because your own numbers get so big and so unwieldy so quickly, which causes the game to move at a rapid clip, there's no meaningful distinction between your own stats, either. Other than the two kings in attack and attack speed, every stat is an opaque resource bucket which amounts to slightly improved chances of survival. Add in the unlockable resource storage limits and you're left with a lot of stats that you're upgrading just because you can and it'd be a waste for the resources to sit around, and any semblance of decisionmaking or character building is reduced to nothing.

This all really stuck in my craw because I like incremental games, which are, (in)famously, about the completely meaningless amassing of resources. But I like how honest they are. You're gathering all these resources and building these buildings and researching these technologies and caring an awful lot about being efficient at times because that's all there is, and it's fun! Horripilant's hybridization introduces a lot of friction, which may be the worst thing an incremental game can do. After all, they're commonly referred to as "idle" games — games that play themselves while you're away to decent effect until you return to get things back on track. Crucially, because Horripilant is a hybrid of specifically an incremental game and dungeon crawler, its two halves have to sleep in different beds. You can't cookie-click or purchase upgrades of any kind while dungeon diving. Ostensibly, this means that the gameplay loop must be to cookie-click and/or idle, purchase a bunch of upgrades, dungeon dive, idle the dungeon dive, and repeat, but that isn't quite right. Whether or not you should idle the dungeon crawling half of the equation or not still escapes me; not because I haven't done the math, but because both methods feel quite bad. (This also explains my unreasonably high 80-hour playtime; I spent a lot of time experimenting before dropping it).

As mentioned before, there are a lot of RPG stats that don't feel well-coordinated. For both our hero and enemies, there's attack, attack speed, health, defense, and evasion. But we can also unlock for ourselves: health regeneration, double hit chance, critical hit chance, reflect chance, and two resource gain modifiers for meat and experience. (There are actually a lot of other stats but they're confined to the "prestige"-style progression system, so I won't mention them just yet.) Health is only improved by leveling up, which you can do by gaining experience, by killing monsters. The other 10 are available as incremental upgrades. After each floor’s boss, you receive a new-roguelike-style three-item "boon" menu, with 1-3 small percentile upgrades of these 10 stats, occasionally accompanied by a couple instant heal options, and, always, the option to return to camp immediately without incurring the normal meat loss for leaving in the middle of a floor. Attack, attack speed, defense, evasion, and health regeneration (primary stats) can be improved by upgrading the different pieces of your equipment with your primary clicky resource, wood. After a bit of time alternating between wood farming and dungeon diving, you'll unlock the secondary resource, rock, and discover you can increase your crit chance, boon effectiveness multiplier, reflect chance, opportunity attack chance, and vampiric hit chance. Although these do briefly have some novelty (three of them aren't even mentioned prior to unlocking them, so they're totally new), you'll quickly realize they're total ass. Critical hits and attacks of opportunity do almost no damage, and vampiric hit rate is both expensive to invest in and heals for very little. You'll eventually unlock the third and final resource, iron, which lets you upgrade your critical hit damage modifier, item slot number, reflect damage modifier, opportunity attack damage modifier, and vampiric hit heal modifier, which finally creates an avenue for the rock upgrades to be worthwhile.

This is already hell to a lot of people, but this is more or less incremental gaming. It's the extremely necessary and harsh split between the three different resource upgrade paths that sticks out. It's a good thing that all those latter upgrades are separated into rock and iron, because there's no reason to buy them for a long, long time, and certainly not above the wood upgrades. There's just no beating raw numbers. Why buy a slightly increased chance of regaining some health on hit when you could just buy more DPS or straight up health regeneration? For most of the game's runtime, the only reason to buy the rock and iron upgrades at all — maybe with the exception of the boon effectiveness multiplier — is because idle farming is free, so it feels like an inefficient use of time to not passively farm rock and iron and spend those resources on upgrades. As is often the case, this reminds me of a tumblr post:

Dear reader, incremental games are all about making ice cubes, but Horripilant often made me feel like I was just making ice cubes. Despite its little roguelike patterns, its persistent engagement of me with clickable damage orbs, the oh-so-satisfying constant thocking, or your entertainingly ridiculous attack speed, I was frequently made aware of the fact that I was making ice cubes. I was also frequently aware of the fact that this is nowhere near the most fun I have had making ice cubes, and sometimes I thought the game would be a lot better if it stopped forcing me to make ice cubes so I could go back to making the other ice cubes.

As I was saying, what hurt the dungeon crawling sections most is the particular way in which they create friction for the incremental game. With incremental games, being present (i.e. clicking) is always going to be the most efficient way to play the game. But you get tired, or busy, or you need to do some math for your progression path, so you need to stop clicking, and the game will keep clicking a bit for you. Horripilant will keep clicking the wood and rock and iron forever, but it will not keep clicking the dungeon crawler forever. Even by idle standards, the dungeon crawler is seriously inefficient without intervention. The 10 stats which you can upgrade each level are of wildly differing importance, with attack and attack speed way, way, way up at the top, the other primary stats in the middle, and the "rock stats" at the bottom alongside meat gain improvement. So, leaving the game to select each level's boon at random means you're wasting a lot of important stats (not to mention that it can choose to heal you or your familiar at nearly-full health instead of selecting a stat increase). Additionally, the dungeon crawler introduces the random element of these little orbs which, when clicked on, do an entire attack of damage (or more) to your opponent. Prestige upgrades can increase the total number, frequency, damage, and more of these orbs — as if getting regular extra attacks wasn't powerful enough. But these are still random, and boons still only appear after each floor's boss is killed; meaning that playing through the dungeon crawling half "actively" still means a lot of doing nothing, since rapid clicking has no extra effect, and you cannot farm your material resources from the dungeon. Just as well, you will eventually die, and although there's no truly serious penalty for doing so, you do not automatically re-enter the dungeon. Further, you cannot idle this part of the game while it's closed, as opposed to the resources, which stock up passively. The dungeon crawler can be idled in a way, but it screams for your attention every second, whether it's up or down.

So, this specific relationship is where Horripilant threatened to completely fall apart for me. It's never quite an idle game or a dungeon-crawling RPG, yet these are the game's two pillars, but they don't play nicely enough together to make a new thing, either. When I first demo'd the game and talked about it on VGBees back in October, I said that what it most reminded me of was actually Loop Hero, one of few roguelikes I really enjoy. Of course, this is mostly because these are both, thematically, hellishly endless games where your protagonist and the enemies they encounter all attack and defend automatically; but this initially shallow comparison helped me to understand what wasn't working about Horripilant for me. Loop Hero doesn't style itself as an idler, but idle farming is an important aspect of the game, especially in the later stages. You create a plan for whichever resources you need to farm, build a card deck to help execute that plan, and then play through the act's boss to a point of stability. Then, you just leave the game on until you've accrued what you need. What's different with Horripilant is how little planning there is; really, you just have to ask yourself if you're willing to enter the dungeon with your current upgrades or if you'd like to spend some time clicking up to the next ones before you go. (There are some consumables too, to be fair; but at the same time, those aren't used automatically either, so they're another point against idle farming in Horripilant). Importantly, there are also many, many more resources in Loop Hero, and many more to be gained by farming in the "dungeons," as opposed to Horripilant, whose dungeon only contains meat (a resource which quickly becomes worthless), experience, and, technically, Hemalith.

Hemalith is the prestiging or resetting resource. In modern and longer incremental games, you can choose to completely reset your progress for some kind of exclusive resource and/or other bonuses. Hemalith is gained by clearing new floors (a non-prestiged save which has gotten through the boss on Floor 21 will have 21 Hemalith) and is spent on reset in an RPG-style upgrade tree. Similar to the game's RPG stats, there are a tremendous amount of upgrades which are not very good. There's just no beating raw numbers. Why would you ever spend precious, limited resources on the tacked-on familiar system or minor cookie-per-click improvements when you could get a multiplier on all resource gain forever? Why spend a boatload of Hemalith on resurrecting once per dungeon run when you could just get enough primary stats to do it right the first time?

(The Hemalith upgrade tree also has some verbiage issues that needed a second pass. Upgrades like "Get an amount of boons for each 10 floor under which your[sic] start your run from" or "Adds another count of each upgrade's base production value on level up." Even disregarding the typos, these are poorly written which makes them difficult to understand.)

The answer would usually be that these are optional stop-gap upgrades if you're struggling to farm up to the big, useful, expensive ones. In other words: ice cube checkpoints. But importantly, all Hemalith upgrades are persistent, and the Hemalith floor counter resets when you do — you don't need to clear a higher floor each time you reset to get any Hemalith at all. For each reset, Floor 21 is Floor 21, and comes with 21 Hemalith (or more, because there are also prestige upgrades to improve Hemalith gain). So the path to getting the big, expensive upgrades is not littered with smaller, less efficient, quasi-mandatory ones; it's just a matter of ice cube-making. But this ice cube maker is so powerful that it trivializes the meat of the game, and, to make matters worse, is introduced extremely early.

All of this is the friction at the core of Horripilant which I had such a hard time with. Whenever it tries to be an incremental game, there's an RPG in the way trying to give meaning to your farming, resources, and statistics, but fails such that it mostly just makes you wonder why you're doing any of this at all. At my least charitable, I'd call it an idle game that demands your attention; an RPG with a lot of indistinguishable stats; a dungeon crawler without planning; and a puzzle game with puzzles so simple I barely even mentioned them, and won't now.

There is a big "and yet" here, but not for me. I think for roguelike and/or RPG lovers who enjoy the feeling of intense scaling and fall a little bit more on the number-crunching side of things, Horripilant could be a really good time. But as someone who was looking for another idle game to enjoy, I found it quite disappointing, if not intensely compulsive.