A Game About Feeding A Black Hole

A Game About Feeding A Black Hole has a premise as literal as its title: sweep a targeting cursor over asteroids, moons, planets, and stars during short timed rounds, and everything you destroy feeds a black hole that grows visibly larger as you go. Between rounds, the currency earned buys upgrades from a sprawling-looking skill tree, unlocking bigger blast radii, critical hits, and eventually stranger effects like lightning arcs across the screen. Built by the two-person team Aarimous and Thornity, it released as a full, non-Early-Access title on 15 December 2025 for Windows, macOS, and Linux, priced at US$6.99.

A short, handsome afternoon

Reviewers are close to unanimous that the game looks and sounds great. One writes that it's "pure digital bubblewrap, not a game so much as it's just satisfying to watch and listen to," while another calls it "an extremely well polished game. A+ on sound, graphics, design, mechanics." The main campaign runs a comfortable two to three hours for most players, and several reviewers who don't fully recommend the game still praise the pacing of that opening stretch, saying it rarely lets you get bored before the next upgrade lands. One reviewer specifically credits the developers for adding a low-end-hardware compatibility option "purely so one guy can play their game," calling it a level of post-launch support that "deserves to be commended."

Achievement hunters find it an easy, satisfying target too. Multiple reviewers report completing 100% of the achievement list in three to six hours, and Steam's own tracking backs that up: the game's early milestones, finishing a session, destroying two asteroids at once, starting with 50 asteroids, all sit above 98% of the player base, meaning almost everyone who buys it clears the opening stretch. Even the campaign-completion achievement sits at a healthy 82.4%, well above what most incrementals see for their core content.

A skill tree that only pretends to branch

The single most repeated complaint across the review pool is that the game's upgrade tree, despite its branching visual layout, rarely offers more than one or two actual choices at a time. One reviewer sums it up bluntly: "the entire skill tree could have been replaced with a button that says 'Unlock next upgrade.'" Another calls it "an early access game in disguise," arguing "the upgrade path is effectively forced, to the point where it might as well be automated." A third reviewer, more sympathetic overall, still concedes that "your choices rarely feel meaningful" and that the tree amounts to "return to the board, move the mouse in circles, go back to upgrades, buy the next available node, and repeat."

That linearity bleeds into how reviewers feel about the extra game modes beyond the main campaign. Several describe electric, zen, and roguelike modes as "worse versions" of the main loop rather than genuinely different content, with one writing that "it would have been better to focus on making one great game mode instead of shipping four subpar extra modes." Steam's achievement data reflects the same drop-off: while the main campaign's completion achievement sits at 82.4%, the epilogue achievement falls to 46.6%, and side-mode achievements like Zen Mode (25.9%) and the Roguelike mode (14.6%) show a majority of buyers never bothering to explore beyond the core loop.

A smaller but still notable group of reviewers pushes back on how Steam categorises the game entirely, arguing it shouldn't wear the "idle" or "clicker" tags at all. "This is absolutely not an idle game," one writes, "I don't know why there are so many games under the idler tag lately that require constant supervision." Another reviewer, largely positive overall, frames it more precisely as "an active incremental game" that rewards quick decisive plays rather than the walk-away-and-check-back pacing the tags might promise, a distinction worth knowing before buying if that hands-off idle loop is specifically what you're after.

Priced for a genre that usually stretches much further

The $6.99 asking price draws its own split opinion, largely because incremental games have a reputation for offering dozens or hundreds of hours for free or nearly free. Reviewers who enjoyed the game tend to frame the price against its short runtime rather than against genre convention, one writes that "0.5hr per dollar is too bad," while another suggests it "should be like $1.99" given how directed the experience feels. Several reviewers explicitly compare it to Leaf Blower Revolution, noting the cursor-sweeping mechanic feels similar, and to Cookie Clicker, mostly to point out how much more that free game offers in comparison, one reviewer jokes there's "none of this years of commitment Cookie Clicker" demands here, framing the comparison as a genuine point in this game's favour for players who don't want an endless commitment.

That short runtime cuts both ways in the reviews. Plenty of players treat two to three hours as exactly right for a $7 purchase, especially when paired with achievement hunting, but just as many describe finishing the main mode and immediately feeling they'd "seen the entire game." The additional modes were clearly meant to extend that runtime, and a handful of reviewers do report enjoying the electric-themed variant in particular, but the broader reviewer consensus is that Black Hole is best approached as a tight, complete afternoon rather than a game to sink real hours into over time, a positioning some buyers are happy to pay for and others feel priced a little high for.

Final verdict

A Game About Feeding A Black Hole is a good-looking, well-composed couple of hours that mostly lives or dies on how much you value an incremental's sense of branching choice. Reviewers agree it's relaxing, well-paced, and easy to finish; they disagree far less than you'd expect on whether its skill tree is really a tree at all, and the achievement data backs the skeptics up more than the fans. Worth a look on sale for a chill afternoon, a tougher sell at full price for anyone expecting the genre's usual depth of build planning.