About Cookie Clicker
Cookie Clicker was something of a phenomenon a few years ago when it originally gained traction, and it's probably still the most popular idle game today. While it wasn't the original idle game, Cookie Clicker was the game that brought the genre to a mainstream audience.
As you can guess, the goal of this game is to bake as many cookies as possible. At first, you can only bake cookies by manually clicking on the large cookie to the left of the window. This is a slow and tedious process, as every click only bakes one cookie. However, once you've made enough cookies this way, you can spend them on upgrades and buildings to help make them faster. As you acquire more and more assistance, the amount of cookies baked per second grows astronomically. Eventually, the number of cookies made every second becomes pretty insane, which is entirely intentional, and seeing how high you can get the numbers to go is part of the fun.
Points of Interest
This is a quirk of idle games in general, as they are essentially just something for you to watch and occasionally interact with. But, depending on what powerups you've acquired, the game will pretend to run after you close it. Thus, you can make progress without having the game open all the time. Its a bit weird, to be honest.
You unlock the gardening minigame by upgrading your farms with sugar lumps. In this minigame, you plant various crops that will provide bonuses for the main game. As an example, Bakers Wheat provides a flat boost to your overall output, while Thumbcorn helps you make more cookies with each click. You can also hybridize plants, eventually creating a large selection of seeds. This is surprisingly difficult to accomplish, but if you manage to unlock every seed, you can trade the full seed catalog to the sugar hornets for many sugar lumps. This also resets the minigame, but it may be worth it if you need more lumps.
Normally, when a game on Steam has achievements, I list it under Steam community features along with other features supplied by the Steam client. In this case, however, both the Steam and the browser versions of the game feature achievements, and earning them has an impact on your game. Every achievement you earn gives you milk, which in turn grants a sizable increase in productivity. Thus, you want to earn as many achievements as possible for the biggest boosts. All sorts of things grant achievements, so try all sorts of things.
Concerns and Issues
The game changes to reflect certain holidays. This is usually superficial, such as the way Easter and Halloween reskin the Golden and Wrath Cookies into bunnies and jack-o-lanterns, but Christmas introduces some new content. During Christmas, the player can purchase Santa Claus and take over his cookie empire. Reindeer also occasionally prance across the window and will grant you more cookies if you can click on them before they leave. Later on, you can gain the ability to toggle the current season, allowing you to gain a year's worth of benefits during a single run.
Buildings are a type of upgrade that can be bought and sold, as the player desires. Many of them are structures, such as farms, factories, or banks, but some are not. One of the buildings you can purchase is Grandmothers. As they are functionally the same as any other building, they can also be sold. Presumably, this is meant to refer to hiring or firing them, but there are some hints that this may not be the case. Notably, there's an achievement earned by selling (not firing) a Grandmother.
While treating Grandmothers as a building is a little odd in its abstract way, some of the other buildings utilize magic to make cookies. The obvious example is the Wizard Towers, which attempt to conjure new cookies into existence. The Alchemy Labs also use magic, turning gold into more precious cookies.
