IIGG: Incremental Idle Goblin Game

Hire goblins, clear the forest, watch the number go up

IIGG doesn't pretend to be anything more than its own subtitle promises. You hire goblins, set them loose stripping the surrounding forest of wood, berries, stone, and ore, then plough the proceeds back into more goblins and faster harvesting. It's the idle genre at its most stripped down — no story, no combat, no real presentation beyond a scattering of goblin sprites milling around a chest. For what it is, the opening hour reads clean: clicking trees for early resources, opening the chest to see what's affordable, and watching the numbers accelerate once the first few goblins are hired feels the way this kind of game is supposed to feel.

The trouble starts once a player looks for anything beyond that loop, and at review time, two out of the three written reviews on file describe hitting the same wall.

A building that doesn't do anything

Early in the map, players are asked to repair a "sweeper hut" for a modest amount of wood. One reviewer describes spending their first several minutes assuming this was the game's actual opening objective, only to find that repairing it "does nothing" — no new resource, no new activity, nothing. A second reviewer worked out, from an achievement description mentioning a score target, that the hut is meant to unlock some kind of minesweeper-style minigame, but couldn't find any way to actually start it.

This isn't a case of one confused player missing an instruction. Steam's own global achievement data confirms it at scale: the achievement tied to that minigame sits at just 3.2% completion, against 93.4% for the game's very first achievement and 83.6% for its second. Whatever the sweeper hut is supposed to do, almost nobody who has played the game has managed to do it. The developer's own reply to one of the reviews confirms as much directly, describing the buildings as "disabled" by an unresolved issue and promising a fix.

The skill tree runs out of things to ask for

The second reported problem sits at the other end of the game. One reviewer who played through to what appeared to be the final tier of the upgrade tree found the last few "upgrades" costing practically nothing — a few seconds' worth of wood and berries, not even the newer resource types the player had just unlocked. The developer's response confirms this too: the final-stage upgrades were pointing at data used earlier in development and will be corrected in an update. Taken together with the sweeper hut, that means both the game's side content and its intended endgame are currently non-functional in ways the developer has acknowledged rather than disputed.

None of this is presented maliciously — the tone of every developer reply is apologetic and specific, and fixes are described as imminent rather than hypothetical. But "the developer says it'll be fixed soon" is a different claim from "it's fixed," and a review written today has to judge the game as it currently stands.

The broader achievement curve suggests a milder version of the same pattern even outside the two confirmed bugs. Completion falls steadily through the game's four numbered milestones — 63.9%, 37.7%, 21.3%, then 11.4% — which is a fairly normal drop-off for an idle game's natural attrition, but it means the audience actually reaching the broken endgame content is already a fraction of an already-small playerbase. That's a small mercy for how many people the skill-tree bug affects in practice, though it doesn't change what a player who does get that far is left with.

A short loop, an awkward refund window

There's a practical complaint threading through all three reviews too: nothing on screen explains the controls. The skill tree — the only real progression system besides buying more goblins — is opened with a keyboard shortcut that isn't mentioned anywhere in the interface, and at least one player discovered it by accident while trying random keys, only to be dropped back to the main menu without a save prompt in the process. For a genre that usually leans on the assumption that you'll idle through long stretches without fresh guidance, an unexplained hotkey standing between a player and the only meaningful decision-making in the game is a rough first impression to leave uncorrected this many days after launch.

Combined with a total playtime that one reviewer put at just over two hours to reach the (broken) end of the skill tree, there's an unfortunate practical wrinkle: Steam's standard two-hour refund window means a player who commits to actually finishing the loop before deciding whether they liked it may find themselves just outside eligibility for a refund by the time they discover how little is actually working.

Final verdict

IIGG's foundation isn't bad — hiring goblins and watching a simple economy climb is exactly as pleasant as the genre promises for its opening stretch, and the price is low enough that the ask is modest. But a broken secondary building mechanic that almost no player has ever gotten working, confirmed by both community reports and the game's own achievement statistics, plus an endgame that currently costs next to nothing to finish, add up to a game that isn't done yet rather than one that's merely small. The developer's quick, honest responses to criticism are a genuinely good sign for where this could land after a patch or two. Today, though, it's hard to recommend paying for a broken half of the game and trusting the other half will arrive.