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A mysterious orb, praising cultists and magical ducks: All Hail the Orb is a fun incremental game that wasn’t quite what we expected.
Sometimes videogames can feel too demanding or overwhelming, as is our daily lives. Wouldn’t it be nicer if the only thing we had to worry about was… praising a mysterious magic orb?
To help put things into an understandable context, All Hail the Orb is a fun incremental game where all you get to do is summon cultists, get help by several ducks and gather resources, all to the service of praising the Orb and freeing the overlord sealed in it. And yeah, you read that right. There are ducks in this game. A lot of ducks. There’s even a gashapon to unlock ducks of increasing rarity, which you’ll then get to assign to certain areas. Initially, as it is an incremental game, you’ll have to start with monotonous tasks of just clicking multiple times without doing much else, to the point where it’ll feel like an autoclicker game. Thankfully, you’ll also be able to just hold the mouse button to act as if it was a turbo button, so the laziest upon you won’t even need to set up external programs to do that.
In any case, after a relatively short period of time you’ll start unlocking new areas to check in your dungeon, more resources to gather and even unlock artifacts to make everything more and more automated, to the point where you’ll probably stop praising the orb yourself. The surprising part is that, even if it’s a small game and simple by nature, the incremental nature of it is surprisingly deep: you’ll constantly feel like there’s something more to unlock and that will require your attention, making the game always feel engaging for the few hours it will last. You’ll even get the chance to unlock specific power-ups by leveling up, somewhat similar to a roguelike but without worrying of messing up your run.
As previously mentioned, the progressive automation means that you’ll mostly need to just keep an eye out on the cultists doing stuff, while you can focus on praising the orb or just indulge in cultivating and selling mushrooms, as that’s the only dungeon activity that will actively need your attention. This makes All Hail the Orb a straightforward game that won’t pressure the player, while also never taking itself seriously — we did mention there are a lot of ducks, right? — and just making you focus on having a relaxed time for the average 4 hours it will last. There’s even a few secrets hidden in the game and unlockables, allowing you to change the color of your hand for clicking activities or even the style of music you’ll hear in the background.
Final Thoughts
That being said, obviously don’t expect to have a groundbreaking replayable masterpiece, as it’s not that kind of game. After you complete the game, you can come back only to being told that there’s nothing left for you there and the job of praising was done.
All Hail the Orb is very simple and easy, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth checking out. We were actually surprised at the amount of content this game had and there was some great level of care by the game’s solo developer Jordan Grant-Hall of LeGingerDev, who clearly just wanted to make the players have fun.
It may not win any kind of GOTY awards, but as long as you have fun and also get an orb to ponder, does it really matter?
The game’s publisher GrabTheGames provided us with a PC copy of All Hail the Orb and screenshots of the game.