A Game About Feeding A Black Hole: A gravitational time consumer

A Game About Feeding A Black Hole is a (shockingly good) incremental game released recently. As the title suggests, filling the game’s empty void is a solitary black hole placed in the center, with the objective of making it as large as possible.

We shall cover all you need to know about this charming game before you purchase it, including some information about its creation. Let’s examine this time-consuming activity and determine exactly what makes it so compelling.

What is A Game About Feeding A Black Hole? 

A Game About Feeding A Black Hole’s gameplay consists of breaking down several objects floating on screen so they can be sucked up by the central black hole, making money for every object consumed. You do this by hovering your cursor over said objects while they progressively break further down. Upgrades can be made to your cursor and the objects floating around, allowing you to earn money even quicker.

To purchase these upgrades, A Game About Feeding A Black Hole features a mechanic not often seen in incremental games: short levels with a time limit. Once this time limit expires, you can go into the upgrade purchasing menu. This gameplay loop is shockingly satisfying, as watching the objects change as you level up while breaking them down becomes increasingly addictive. Additionally, upgrades can be purchased to increase the amount of time allotted, making it easier to reach the set milestones. When you reach said milestones, the black hole increases in size, and more time is given. 

With the already fun gameplay loop paired with simply the quantity of available upgrades, a playthrough of A Game About Feeding A Black Hole will have you constantly increasing your productivity, and thus increasing the amount of available options. The best upgrades we found were those that added special floating objects that interacted with others. For example, electricity chaining across all objects in proximity caused huge amounts of income with very little effort. 

When did A Game About Feeding A Black Hole release?

A Game About Feeding A Black Hole’s release date was the 15th of December. This comes just three months after the release of the demo, which showcased a little of what this game had to offer. While the game’s development schedule is quite remarkable, given that it was created by a duo, it still manages to be an entertaining experience, even within the limitations presented.

Who developed A Game About Feeding A Black Hole?

The A Game About Feeding A Black Hole developers are Aarimous (Andy) and ThornityCo (Cody). According the Aarimous’ website, he partnered with Cody to assist with “balance, design and marketing”. The two are also listed as publishers on the Steam page.  

The two of them have also well-documented the development on their various social media platforms. More so than this, the A Game About Feeding A Black Hole news page on Steam has been very well updated, with both patch notes and Q&As with the developers. 

A Game About Feeding A Black Hole demo vs the release version

The A Game About Feeding a Black Hole demo is a relatively short venture; however, it provides a good overview of the game. Within it, you have a small glimpse into the vast upgrade tree and unlock a few abilities to help with amplifying your profits. However, clearly a lot is left out of the demo, as we were able to fully complete the upgrade tree in the only available mode in a little under half an hour.

Meanwhile, in the full game, the upgrade tree is expanded upon to ludicrous levels. Everything you can think of is an available upgrade, with a further increased cursor radius so more objects can be smashed at once, or more abilities that allow for chaining of broken objects. Especially considering that A Game About Feeding A Black Hole’s price is $6.99, we highly recommend checking out the full version if you enjoyed the demo.

Does A Game About Feeding A Black Hole end?

Due to the nature of the game, A Game About Feeding A Black Hole‘s ending is mostly up to the player. The black hole can increase in size up to a certain point; however, that is not really the end of the game. Due to the incredibly expansive upgrade tree, the game couldn’t truly be considered finished until all of these upgrades were obtained.

In addition, A Game About Feeding A Black Hole features several modes and challenges, adding several more hours of playtime atop the main gameplay mode. Further game modes are also set to be added, as mentioned by the developers in a post they made after the game’s release to the Steam news tab.

Why are idle games still popular today?

It’s challenging to pinpoint why incremental games and even “idle games” remain popular today. Given their initial surge in popularity over a decade ago, it is somewhat perplexing to see the genre maintain its momentum all these years later. We believe, however, that there are a few reasons why this genre is still relevant today.

One such reason is that, despite the relatively simple approach to gameplay, many games utilize it less as a weakness and more as a strength. A Game About Feeding A Black Hole is one of these. The ease with which a player can find themselves constantly wanting to amass more money is shocking. An additional benefit of this, within the current gaming landscape, it makes streaming and creating videos on the games very fruitful for all involved parties. This means that popularity for these games increases at exponential rates, somewhat appropriately, given that it is the point of many of these games.

Overall, A Game About Feeding A Black Hole is a fantastically captivating game, and it has some very good design choices to thank for that. The game is minimalist, but that plays exactly into the game’s merit, as it is simply about… feeding a black hole. This premise is interesting enough on its own; however, it is executed exceptionally well in this game, more so than most incremental games currently available. And while some players of the genre may find the lack of automation unfitting for an incremental game, the use of timed levels makes this a unique experience and something the genre will definitely benefit from.  

References

1. AARIMOUS (Aarimous)
2. ThornityCo on Twitch (Twitch)