SIM - Simple Idle Miner

Kitty Games doesn't oversell SIM - Simple Idle Miner even slightly — the title is the pitch. Click a resource bar, watch a number grow, spend it on the next upgrade tier, repeat until a prestige reset called New Game Plus lets you do it all again with a permanent bonus. It's a small, self-contained release that costs less than a coffee, and everything about it — the store page's own playtime estimate, its 46-achievement checklist, the handful of reviews it has attracted — points to a game that knows exactly how big it wants to be. What's worth asking is whether that honesty is enough to carry a genre this crowded, and the honest answer sits somewhere in the middle: genuinely more structure than the price suggests, with a few gaps that matter more than their size implies.

A spreadsheet with a rocket at the end

The interface is unapologetically functional. Eight resource rows stack down the left side of the screen, each with an icon, a fill bar and a level counter, alongside an upgrade cost that climbs from 15 units on the first tier to 2,268,000 on the eighth. A currency counter sits top-centre, a set of icon buttons along the top row open the building overview, offline-time tracking, the endgame rocket and a stats screen, and a settings panel in the top-right corner covers music and sound-effect sliders, a mine-sound toggle and a language switch between English and German. The whole thing reads like a dashboard because that's what it is — there's no attempt to disguise the spreadsheet under the pixel art, and for a genre where players spend hours staring at exactly this kind of screen, legibility at a glance is the right thing to prioritise. The goal sitting behind all of it, per the store description, is to gather enough resources to help a cast of "important persons" escape the planet — the rocket icon in the top bar is a literal countdown to that ending, not just decoration.

Ferdinand Fuchs and the price of escape

The one place SIM spends real design effort beyond the spreadsheet is its cast. Ferdinand Fuchs — a pixel-art fox in a top hat and suit — stands at the bottom of the screen delivering lines that swing from dry to outright barbed: the store page promises dialogue "that range from amusing to borderline offensive," and the sample lines available back that up ("this work here is your meaning in life" is about as gentle as he gets). He's also got an unlockable costume system, and the store page notes each outfit comes with its own set of barks, which is a reasonable amount of writing to attach to what is otherwise a bare-bones production. It's worth being honest about what this does and doesn't fix: it doesn't change the underlying loop, but it does mean the game has a voice, which puts it a step ahead of the many idle clickers that ship as pure numbers with no framing at all. The rough edge is that the English text isn't fully polished — one captured line reads "First proof yourselfe worthy and then come back," a typo that's easy to forgive at this price but is there on a release with only two supported languages and no larger localisation pass to catch it.

Eight tiers, one prestige button, and the mods that stretch it further

Underneath the dialogue, the actual system has more moving parts than "click bar, buy upgrade" suggests at first glance. The eight resource tiers each level independently, XP earned from mining feeds into a New Game Plus reset that the store page says unlocks "even more bonus production," and NG+ specifically gates a second panel of buildings that provide passive, automated output rather than requiring more clicking — screenshots of the building panel show thresholds running from 50 XP up to 20,000M, each locked behind a "?" icon and the note "Earn XP and go NG+ to activate this building" until it's reached. Past that, the store page lists an Endless Mode for players who've cleared the core content and want the numbers to keep climbing, plus a set of "Simple Idle Mods" described as combinable challenge modifiers, letting players stack difficulty conditions to taste. None of this is inventive by incremental-game standards — prestige loops, endless modes and optional modifiers are all established genre furniture — but it's a genuinely complete set of them for a project this size, and it's the reason the store page's own estimate ("Vanilla: 4-5 hours," "+1-2 hours" for achievements, "+ EndlessMode; + Mods = X hours extra") reads as a fair description rather than marketing padding.

What the store page's own numbers say

With no Metacritic entry and only six Steam reviews on record — four positive, two negative, which is too small a sample for Steam to generate its own percentage score — there isn't much outside voice to lean on here, so it's worth reading every one of them in full rather than sampling. Three of the four positive reviews give concrete numbers: one reports completing the game 100% at roughly 9 hours played and calls it "an idle/clicker enthusiasts dream game," a second reached the end at 4-5 hours plus another hour chasing achievements and calls the pre-automation opening "a bit tedious," and a third logged about 7 hours with no complaints beyond brevity. The achievement data backs the shape of that account up independently: SIM_Story_0 sits at 100% completion (everyone who's opened the achievement panel has triggered it, consistent with an early story beat), the resource- and building-tier achievements spread fairly evenly between roughly 30% and 72%, and SIM_Completed_0 — the achievement tied to finishing the game — sits at 25.1%. A quarter of everyone tracked reaching the actual ending is a strong number for an idle game, a genre where most releases see the vast majority of owners drift away long before the credits.

The rough edges

The two negative reviews on record point at real, specific problems rather than general dissatisfaction, which is exactly why they're worth weighing seriously even at a sample size of two. The more detailed of the pair, logged at 20 minutes played, calls out "no graphic settings like resolution, no auto" — and both complaints check out against the interface itself. The settings panel does cover music, sound effects and a mine-sound toggle, but the only screen-related controls visible are a pair of small icon buttons that read as fullscreen toggles, not a resolution dropdown, which is a genuine gap for a game meant to be left running for hours. The "no auto" complaint lands because it's accurate for exactly the window that reviewer played in: the passive, automated buildings are locked behind New Game Plus, so the first chunk of any run is pure manual bar-clicking by design. One of the positive reviews independently flags the same stretch as "a bit tedious" before automation opens up — it's a deliberate pacing choice rather than a bug, but it's also the single most common friction point across the entire (small) review sample, positive and negative alike.

Final verdict

SIM - Simple Idle Miner earns a 6.5 for delivering more structure than its price and its plain interface let on — eight upgrade tiers, a New Game Plus loop that meaningfully changes how the game plays by unlocking automation, an Endless Mode, combinable mods and a 46-achievement checklist the game's own completion data shows players actually finishing. It doesn't score higher because the moment-to-moment loop is genre-standard with nothing mechanically new, because the options panel is missing a resolution setting that a game meant for long sessions really needs, and because the manual, automation-free opening stretch is the one complaint that shows up on both sides of its tiny review sample. For NZ$3.74, it's an honest, complete package that knows its own scope — just don't expect the fox's personality to carry a system this familiar much past the hours the store page itself promises.