Potato Please

This is one of the weirdest incrementals I’ve ever played. About an hour in, the game completely abandons its premise of actually peeling potatoes and turns into one of the worst-designed automation incrementals out there, where you just wait for the game to beat itself while trying to unstick bugged potatoes from the floor. The experience is interesting in that the game is very polished visually and in some technical aspects, and every dozen or so minutes you do something slightly different. But the overall flow is a loop where the game introduces a new mechanic, and then you mindlessly engage with it for 30 minutes without any real thinking, just doing the same repetitive action with no variation. First you peel potatoes, and there’s some sense of progress and all that, but over time it boils down to moving your mouse up and down. Then your game turns into hauling sacks from point to point. Then you keep doing the same thing, just running a shorter distance. Finally you operate a crane for 5 minutes, because that gets automated too, and the game ends. It’s just boring in the long run, because the game has an interesting, original idea, but it turns into one of the most mindless automation incrementals, where even the automation itself is mindless, since you just buy upgrades the way the quests tell you to and the game plays itself. And fine. I could’ve lived with that, if it weren’t one of the most expensive incrementals on the market. This game costs $9 for 3 hours of gameplay. That’s absurd. There’s no build crafting like in One Million Coins. There’s mindless mouse wiggling up and down, which then turns into running around with sacks. If the game required planning your automation or some logic in how things work, it could’ve been great, because the core mechanics are very carefully made. But that’s not the case. Potato Please is a game about moving your mouse up and down, which then becomes a game about carrying sacks from point A to point B, until even that disappears and the game beats itself. And it pains me to say this, because I was looking forward to this game. There’s also a story, but I find it a childish take on something Papers, Please handled way better, mostly because it was longer and had the time to pull it off. That’s hard here, because the game is so short that getting invested in the story and its choices is nearly impossible. Not to mention how shallowly the government, the rebels and your family are portrayed. Sadly, it doesn’t save the game. I’d recommend waiting for a sale.