Nearly Impossible Odds

Nearly Impossible Odds, from developer Persimmon Games, builds its idle loop around a specific, unusual premise: each of its twenty stages sets a wildly improbable challenge, drawing matching cards from two full decks, rolling every die to the same face, and asks the player to clear it through repeated attempts, gradually shortening those odds with experience-funded upgrades. It's a small release with six reviews on record, five of them positive, and reading through that sample in full finds a genuinely distinctive central idea that reviewers consistently praise, paired with specific, detailed complaints about how the systems built around that idea hold up once a stage's difficulty climbs.

A hook reviewers keep calling clever

The probability-challenge premise draws real, specific praise across language groups. One English-language reviewer describes watching the odds "go from the millions into the double digits" as a genuinely amazing feeling, while rating the underlying idea highly even while marking down its execution. A detailed Japanese-language review, despite ultimately stepping away from the game partway through, explicitly calls the core idea very good and says it hopes to see the surrounding balance improved in future updates, the kind of qualified praise that suggests real appreciation for the concept rather than a reviewer simply being polite about a game they didn't enjoy. That kind of convergence, from reviewers who otherwise land on different sides of a recommendation, is a solid signal that the central hook itself is doing its job.

A passive loop with a real bug attached

The sample's lone negative review is short on playtime but specific in its complaints, and the most serious of them is a concrete bug report: if a player lets upgrade-choice points accumulate past one before spending them, the counter silently resets to zero rather than preserving the surplus, quietly erasing progress earned during exactly the kind of extended idle session the genre is built around. The same review lists a cluster of missing quality-of-life basics, no way to adjust sound or video settings mid-stage, no confirmation when changing resolution, no way to back out of a forced upgrade prompt, and an experience bar that displays raw totals rather than the multiplier-adjusted amount a player is actually earning. None of these are fatal individually, but together they describe a game whose one interactive system, choosing upgrades, is both the entire point of engaging with it and the part still carrying rough edges at launch.

A back half several reviewers say stalls out

The most detailed account in this sample comes from a Japanese-language reviewer who logged over four hours and reached stage seventeen of twenty before giving up. Their breakdown is specific: once experience generation outpaces the value of individual reward choices, the game's reward-selection system applies a single chosen upgrade across an entire batch of pending level-ups rather than letting each one be picked individually, which wastes any run where only low-rarity options are on offer and undercuts the idle feeling the genre depends on, since a player has to stay engaged watching for a good roll rather than truly leaving the game running. That same reviewer, along with a separate English-language account logging over six hours, independently reports that permanent upgrades simply stop keeping pace with the game's rising difficulty in its second half, growing more expensive without delivering proportionate benefit. Two reviewers reaching that same conclusion from different stages of play, one still actively engaged and one who eventually gave up, points to a genuine late-game balance problem rather than an isolated frustration.

Weighing a small but consistent sample

Six reviews is a thin pool, and the five-to-one split toward the positive reflects genuine, specific enthusiasm for the game's central idea rather than a shallow or reflexive endorsement. But it's worth being honest that even the sample's positive reviews consistently pair their praise with the same underlying caveat, upgrades that stop mattering and a loop that grows more passive rather than more rewarding as it goes on. That's a more informative pattern for a prospective buyer than the raw score alone, a game whose fans and its lone critic broadly agree on where the weaknesses sit. None of the six reviews report crashes or lost save data outright, aside from the specific upgrade-point reset bug, so this reads as a stable release whose problems are squarely about pacing and system design rather than technical instability.

Price against what's actually there

At NZ$7.39, the game sits in the same bracket as several other small-scale idle releases covered here, and its price is worth weighing against how much of its twenty-stage structure reviewers actually reach before stalling out. The reviewer who logged the most detailed account of the back half got seventeen stages in before stopping, and two separate reviewers independently describe permanent upgrades losing their impact well before that point. That doesn't make the asking price unreasonable given the hours several reviewers did get out of it, but it does mean a buyer should expect the value proposition to be strongest in the opening stages, where the probability-challenge hook is still fresh and the upgrade loop still feels like it's keeping pace, rather than across the full twenty-stage arc the store page implies.

Final Verdict

Nearly Impossible Odds has a genuinely clever hook at its centre, and the feeling of watching outlandish odds close in over a session is one several independent reviewers single out unprompted. But the systems meant to sustain that hook across twenty stages draw specific, converging complaints: a passive upgrade loop with real quality-of-life gaps, a bug that can quietly erase idle progress, and a back half several reviewers say stops rewarding continued play. Worth trying for the strength of its central idea and its first several hours, but go in with tempered expectations for how well it holds up once the odds get truly nearly impossible.