Insanity Clicker

Every clicker owes something to Clicker Heroes, but few admit it as openly as Insanity Clicker's own review section does. Scroll through the positive write-ups and the word "reskin" shows up almost as often as it does in the negative ones — the difference is that the players recommending it usually add that they liked this version better, because PlayFlock swapped Clicker Heroes' fantasy heroes for a rotting asylum full of maniacs, mutants and deranged former doctors, and the art actually commits to that premise. It's a legitimately good hook for a free browser-style clicker. The trouble is what happens after the hook wears off: a progression wall that PlayFlock's own players have been documenting since launch week in 2016, still being documented in near-identical terms in 2024, on a game whose developer stopped posting updates in the middle of 2020.

An asylum reskin that earns the reskin

Insanity Clicker began as Безумие ("Insanity"), a clicker on the Russian social network VK, before PlayFlock brought it to Steam in June 2016. The premise: you're trapped in an abandoned hospital, clicking to fight off the inmates who've taken it over while consuming pills and mutagens to "stay sane." Mechanically it's the standard idle-clicker skeleton — click to deal direct damage, hire automatic damage-per-second minions, spend a soft currency on upgrades, ascend for a permanent multiplier and start again — and reviewers who've played both games are blunt that the underlying math and upgrade curve track Clicker Heroes closely enough to call it a straight copy rather than an homage. What keeps that comparison from being fully damning is presentation. The monster roster is genuinely unsettling rather than generic-fantasy, the boss encounters carry a real sense of dread for a game with no combat animation beyond static art, and even the reviewers most annoyed by the cloned mechanics tend to carve out an exception for how the game looks and feels to sit inside. That's a narrower compliment than "good game," but it's a real one, and it's the reason Insanity Clicker has held onto a player base at all rather than disappearing into the pile of Clicker Heroes clones Steam absorbed in the years after that game's success.

The wall at level 2000-2400

The single most damaging fact about Insanity Clicker isn't a matter of opinion — it's a progression bug the game's own community has been reporting for the better part of a decade. A 172-vote review from December 2016 describes being unable to advance past "a level around 2000-2400," calling the balancing broken and the endgame effectively unreachable. The same complaint, in close to the same words, reappears in a 102-vote review from November 2024: "when the last minion is hired, the game is over... you will be stuck forever in a level around 2000-2400, impossible to reach level 3000 and 4000." Eight years separate those two reviews. The wall hasn't moved. Both reviewers describe the developer acknowledging the complaint on community forums and declining to treat it as an error worth fixing — which lines up with the fact that PlayFlock's last public update to the game, a "technical maintenance" notice, was posted in August 2020 and nothing has followed it since. Steam's own achievement data corroborates the shape of the wall even where the review text doesn't: the "sinsAfterAscension" milestone achievements, which track deep post-prestige progress, fall from 19% of the tracked population at the first tier to under 9% by the 250th, a curve consistent with a large share of players hitting a hard stop long before the content the game nominally offers runs out.

PvP and the achievement list nobody can finish

Insanity Clicker ships with an asynchronous PvP mode, and several of its higher-numbered achievements are locked behind PvP rank milestones. On paper that's a reasonable way to add a second progression track to a clicker. In practice, the game's current population makes it close to decorative: Steam's global achievement percentages put every pvpRank milestone at 3-5% completion, and the concurrent player count sits in the low dozens on an ordinary day. A 2026 review flags this directly, warning newer players that the hidden PvP achievements are "nearly impossible to get" because the game is effectively dead in the matchmaking sense, and notes that the community has asked PlayFlock to remove or replace those achievements so 100% completion is achievable by some other route — a request the changelog silence since 2020 suggests nobody is going to act on. It's a smaller problem than the level 2000 wall, but it points at the same root cause: a live-service layer left running with no one maintaining the population it depends on.

Monetisation: a free clicker with a familiar squeeze

Insanity Clicker doesn't charge to install and doesn't run advertising, which puts it ahead of plenty of mobile-style clickers on the baseline terms. Where it gets less comfortable is the pacing beyond the opening hours: several of the game's highest-voted negative reviews, dating from its first two months on Steam, describe a curve that shifts from a normal free-to-play grind into something closer to a forced choice between spending real money or investing thousands of additional hours to reach content that used to be reachable in a fraction of that time. PlayFlock also sells a Collection Pack DLC on Steam for NZ$23.99 — an art book plus 500 crystals (the premium currency) and a cosmetic item set — which is a straightforward, disclosed transaction rather than anything hidden, but its own review sample is tiny and evenly split (9 positive of 17 at last check), which isn't much of an endorsement for a $24 add-on to a free game. None of this crosses into outright predatory territory — nothing here sells a competitive edge that can't be earned by playing, since the PvP mode both sides of the transaction can access is the part of the game already described above as barely populated — but it's monetisation designed around the same progression curve that produced the level 2000 complaints, not a system built to make that curve feel fair.

Where it sits against its inspiration

Compared directly with Clicker Heroes, the game it's most often accused of copying, Insanity Clicker offers a more distinctive visual identity and loses on almost everything else: a maintained content pipeline, a functioning endgame, and a developer still answering the community about balance. Set against AdVenture Capitalist, another name its harsher reviewers invoke, it's a heavier, more atmospheric experience but a far less polished one. The honest framing is that Insanity Clicker earned its initial audience on art direction it genuinely delivers on, and lost most of the goodwill that could have followed by leaving a known, reported, repeatedly-reported progression bug unresolved for the better part of a decade.

Verdict

Insanity Clicker is free, it looks like nothing else in the genre for its first few hours, and there's a real, if faded, argument for spending an evening with it on that basis alone. It is not, in any meaningful sense, a finished or maintained game in 2026. The level 2000-2400 wall that first-week reviewers reported in June 2016 is the same wall a reviewer reported in November 2024, PlayFlock's last public communication was in 2020, and the PvP achievement track exists mostly as a reminder that a mode built around other players doesn't survive a developer walking away from the player base that used to sustain it. Players who want the atmosphere without the baggage should treat it as a short, free curiosity rather than a game worth grinding toward 100% completion. Anyone drawn to idle games specifically for their sense of a world that keeps moving while they're away — the appeal Wanderer itself is built around — will find a game here that mostly just stopped.