Cookie Clicker was updated to steal more of your life

Cookie Clicker, the clicking simulator that doesn’t simulate anything, it just makes you click things, has been updated for the first time in three years and it’s looking to hook into your brain’s addictive reward mechanics like never before.

The developers claim on the official Tumblr post, to have have added new buildings for your to earn cookies from, some new “heavenly” upgrades, additional sounds to make everything more exciting, angels, and switches and apparently there’s a couple of dragons now. It’s not clear if those dragons are something you have to fight, feed cookies to or just some visual treat further down the road, but if you haven’t got a previous game to load up and utilise, it may take you a while to see any of that further content.

Still, if you have nothing to do for a few days and want to see if you can give your index finger RSI all by itself, Cookie Clicker is an annoyingly addictive way to spend your time. If you’ve never played it before, it has you clicking on a giant cookie. You then spend those cookies on upgrades that click it automatically for you, or earn you cookies through farms, mines and old grannies baking them for you.

It’s a ‘game’ that boils down the idea of gaming to its core, which is numbers starting low and getting higher as you perform actions and strategize through purchases. Cookie Clicker is what runs under the hood of every game you’ve ever played and it’s amazing how well it works if you strip it all back and throw a food theme on top.