All Hail The Orb Review

I pledge my life to the Orb!

I don’t play many clicker or incremental games, let alone incremental clicker games, but sometimes there’s one that just catches your eye. One that you just have to play. Recently, I came across one that gave me that feeling. When I first learned about this game I actually wasn’t going to pick it up, as like I said I don’t play many games in this genre. However, I decided to look more into the game and did some research which I was like “okay, yeah”. And, well, here I am. So, how did All Hail The Orb turn out?

In All Hail The Orb, the game starts with you being absolutely transfixed on a gray old orb that you came across. As you stare into the orb you hear a faint voice, or maybe multiple voices, asking you to help, that they’ve been trapped, to awaken them, and to simply click the orb. Which you do once the urge is too strong to resist. After you click it enough, a burst of light comes out and you’re greeted with the orb now glowing purple and a little guy. This little guy is so happy to be free after a long time of being trapped in the orb, but that excitement is short lived once it realizes that its master is still trapped. While this little guy was small enough to get out, well it seems like its master wasn’t and the orb must grow to its full size. Lucky for you, you have the honor of being the first follower, the first one to pour devotion into the orb, which gives you the honor of also being in charge. Yay!

As you devote yourself to this trapped god, you find out that you managed to wander into a dungeon. One that is bigger than you’d think. As you gather resources, progress, and unlock more rooms you’ll not only find something new to manage or help you out, but also even other guys that’ve been trapped since the doors locked 1,000 years ago. Oh wow. That’s a long time. Also, while you don’t know what this trapped god looks like, you do get some obvious hints. Anyway, the dungeon is pretty connected to the orb so a healthy dungeon is a happy orb. And vice versa. So time to buckle down, summon some cultist helpers, and slowly, but surely, work your way to releasing this poor trapped god.

The story here is pretty much a framing device and it works pretty well here. The simple story really pairs well with this genre and I love how the game doesn’t hide how silly it is as it did elevate it for me. Heck, I don’t think I would have picked this up if it wasn’t a silly little game as, fun fact, it was the reason why I decided to try it out. I like how the dialogue is written here, which manages to be charming rather than cringe, and a lot of the descriptions for things are fun too. There are descriptions that simply say what it is, but there are a lot that add a little bit of silliness to brighten things up which I really loved. There was one, maybe two, descriptions that I didn’t quite understand, but overall you’ll know what each one does.

So, yeah, All Hail The Orb is as silly as the store page promises and it gives you some pretty good motivation.

It’s time to dive into the gameplay, which is pretty simple here as you’d expect. You start out with just the main orb room with the orb where you can click, or hold, it to gain devotion. Devotion is the first resource that you’ll collect in the game and you can use this to buy some upgrades to make things more efficient like increasing how much devotion you get per click and increasing the value of it. It doesn’t take long before the game expands. You’ll be able to summon cultists which you can assign to collect devotion alongside you and there are upgrades that target the cultists and make them more efficient in gathering it. Though, they do have an energy meter which they will have to rest once it’s fully depleted. The cultists will eventually get to the point where you can just leave it up to them to collect your resources, but the game is designed so you personally clicking is best.

You’ll also unlock the storage room where the vats for the various resources are located. This is where you can see a physical representation of what you have and where you’ll be able to upgrade your storage so you can hold more. And, once you buy the upgrade for experience to have a chance of appearing when clicking/holding the orb. Yep, the dungeon has a level. Leveling up the dungeon will grant you a chest which you can open for a reward. There are level up milestones where you get specific rewards to add something helpful or boost something, but other than that you’ll be able to choose one of the upgrades that you want the most. This will also unlock the obelisk which is the main way to progress. You see, the game is split up into five stages. Each stage has requirements that you need to fulfill to be able to go to the next stage which is leveling the dungeon to a certain level and feeding it a certain amount of resources. This will then unlock new rooms and thus new resources and mechanics. It basically serves as a way so you can’t go ham in the beginning and so you slowly get introduced to everything rather than risking you feeling overwhelmed if it was all at once.

Talking about that, as you progress and unlock more rooms you’ll also unlock more resources. Which, of course, you can click (or hold) to gather it yourself, assign cultists to automate it, and use your resources to upgrade the various aspects to make collecting a ton of that resource more efficient. Each stage unlocks one new resource and each one has varying degrees of how much you need to watch it. Most of them can pretty much be left alone once you get it going, but there is one that is fully manual until you get to the later stage. Each resource, despite pretty much being simplified as just needing to click to gather it, managed to be unique in its own way which was pretty nice. Not to mention the devices that you’ll be able to unlock and will help you out, like beds so cultists regain energy faster, a research station to get passives, a way to assign cultists to specialize in one resource for a 100% boost, and ducks which don’t seem quite useful at first but are once you unlock the next steps to get duck stations.

As for any side stuff, while you’ll be using every mechanic you technically don’t have to fully upgrade everything to finish the game. There are also a lot of different ducks that you have a chance of getting, varying in rarities, cultist bonuses, and designs. There are some pretty cute ducks in the pool (and also useful, but let’s be honest I’m here for the cute ducks). There is also a room called Hall of Accolades which you’ll get points for every achievement you get, which you can then spend for some optional cosmetics like different cursors and different music tracks.

My babies ♥

I honestly really enjoyed the gameplay here. Who knew it would be hard trying to talk about the gameplay when it’s just clicking and waiting as resources accumulate incrementally. Plus, I didn’t want to talk about every little thing. Anyway, this game starts off slow as expected, but man does it feel pretty satisfying as you slowly upgrade the various aspects, unlock more rooms and more resources, see those numbers climb higher, and then eventually have it so the cultists take over for you. It gets absolutely bananas after a certain point too which was pretty great. I have to say that this game does a great job with having everything be interconnected and with progression. You’ll mainly use the resource you gathered to upgrade the device that gives you that resource, but there are some other areas where they can be used at, like the upgrades that aren’t directly tied to a resource, and it’s used as a way to block progression. I also like how there are some locked upgrades that you don’t know what you’ll get until you unlock it which ends up being passive upgrades.

The progression is very well done here. I found that the obelisk requirements to get to the next stage are pretty reasonable and while your progression will eventually get blocked, you can choose when you progress to the next stage. So you can aim to grab all the upgrades until you hit that progression block or progress immediately. Unlocking a new resource for each stage was also pretty smart as it does help in not overwhelming you. After all, it’s highly likely you’ll have the last resource you unlocked automated so you can focus on the new resource. And there being devices that are connected to other mechanics, and not the resources, help you feel like you’re unlocking more as you’ll also unlock those rooms and mechanics as you progress. And like I briefly mentioned before, all the different resource devices happen to feel unique in the way the resource it’s connected to is gathered which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense until you play it.

Oh, and I really loved how you can hold down the mouse rather than clicking. It really helps if your hand cramps up and if you overused it in the past through typing way too much for too long or if you went too ham on past clicker games you’ve played. There is one resource that you can only click, but I found that it was so quick to automate that it wasn’t a big deal.

I’m probably simplifying this too much, or maybe not enough, but hopefully I made it understandable. I didn’t really want to mention everything as that would be too much and part of the fun is discovering it yourself. Just…don’t do the duck gacha right as you unlock it. Trust me. Each resource has an upgrade that adds more ducks to the pool and, just like everything else, the price increases with each duck purchased.

As for negatives, I don’t really have any. The ones that I was mentally pinning as I was playing were more along the lines of “I wished this was a thing” and it turned out it was an unlock in a future stage or was a hidden unlock. I guess if I have to mention something it’s that the game does slow down towards the end due to the high requirements for the last obelisk stage (though I kinda excuse it due to it being the last stage and it did allow me time to figure out how to maximize my mushroom profit), it’s going to take a long time if you’re wanting to 100% the game, knowledge was the only resource I was surprised with how quickly it becomes irrelevant, and I did wish the last upgrade for resource storage wasn’t so high as I honestly loved seeing the vats fill up and glow.

Okay, I guess I did have some small complaints haha, but I didn’t find any of them affected my enjoyment of the game.

To tie this all up in a bow, the visuals and sound were also well done here. The visuals here are cute. I liked the layout of the dungeon, which it’s designed so you can pretty easily remember where every room is in relation to the other rooms (don’t worry there is a shortcut), and the pixel art for the various things were well done, clear at a glance, and can be pretty cute. Like, the ducks are so cute and it’s even cuter that each cultist and duck has their own name (fun fact, I got a cultist named Linda right as Bob’s Burgers started playing on the TV). The mini resource sprite that comes out from the device to go to the left corner of the screen can lag the game once it starts getting crazy, but you can disable it. As for sound, the sound effect for resources being added to your total is quite nice and the default track that loops is honestly pretty good. It did have me dancing a little in my seat and I liked it enough that I didn’t feel the need to unlock other songs (which they’re also good). This game is also great to listen to something else while playing if you want to catch up on a podcast or listen to a long video that you can just listen to with little to no watching.

Verdict

All Hail The Orb turned out to be a really enjoyable experience. The gameplay may be able to be simplified as clicking and waiting as the numbers go up, but man does it do a really good job with interconnected everything is and how progression is structured both with each resource’s upgrade paths and overall progression that keeps the game from getting overwhelming. It’s also pretty satisfying as you accumulate upgrades, slowly making resource gathering more effective and automated, until you realize just how far you’ve come as you see how absolutely bananas it became (especially as you’re metaphorically lounging like you’re at the beach occasionally managing things or gathering resources yourself). Not to mention the silliness of the game, the cute pixel art, and a good looping music track that got stuck in my head as I was writing this review. All Hail The Orb blended clicker and incremental elements really well to where I can see it bringing in clicker fans, incremental fans, and people that don’t play clicker or incremental games alike.

If this game interests you at all, it’s definitely worth picking up as it’s a really solid and enjoyable game.