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The Greenening is a relaxing yet radical exploration of how we play incremental games
R
Rachel Watts
But there’s one incremental game that’s taking a more introspective stance on the genre, and that’s The Greenening by Erkberg Games. It has all the familiar game systems of clicker and idle games, but the themes, atmosphere, and the ultimate goal of the player are radically different.
From seedling to sprout
The Greenening is a laid-back incremental game where you’re tasked with restoring a dying planet, turning its ash-choked wasteland into a vibrant new world. Using water droplets from a cloud, you need to clear away layers of ash from the planet’s surface to reveal resources, which then help you unlock new abilities and upgrades to clean up more ash. When your water droplets run out, the day ends, and starting a new day means restoring a new plot of land.
For solo developer Erik Schulze, the concept of The Greenening began to take form around two years ago. “I started conceptualizing the game in late 2024 and began with a prototype in early 2025,” Schulze says. “This led nicely into producing the full game, which I've been doing ever since.”
Schulze explains that although the beginning of this project began relatively recently, it’s been an idea he’s had for over a decade. The earliest iteration of the idea was a game he made in 48 hours for a game jam back in 2016. That game jam was Ludum Dare 31, and the theme was "entire game on one screen." This early iteration of the game was more action-oriented, combining elements of tower defense and strategy. It’s a world away from what the game would eventually become, but it provided an idea-rich bed where The Greenening would grow.
“That one was also an incremental game, and the thought of realizing this core idea of watering a barren landscape and making it bloom again accompanied me through the years,” Schulze says. “I occasionally tried creating prototypes with different mechanics for it, but nothing really worked out in the end. Until now, that is.”
Schulze is a self-described hobby game dev who has been making games for over twenty years. As a teenager, he made games with RPG Maker, then moved to Flash and Construct 2. When he finished his studies, he joined indie developer Studio Fizbin in early 2017 as a Unity developer, then became a solo developer in 2021. “My main background lies in programming, but through years of making lots of very small, kinda-finished games, mostly during game jams, I also learned a lot about the other aspects of game development.”
After his time at Fizbin and years of making personal projects, Schulze released his first game, Recollection, in April 2023. Recollection is a short walking sim where the player connects with aspects of nature through mini-games. Just like The Greenening, a major theme of his first game is appreciating the natural world, a topic Schulze intends to continue exploring in his work.
“I just love nature so, so much. Walking through forests and across mountainscapes is just the best thing ever. It's kind of become my theme as a game dev overall,” Schulze says. “I think there can't be enough reminders that we need to be careful and caring towards the natural world. With my games, I want to increase appreciation and awareness for nature, and all it encompasses.”
Where Recollection is a reflection on appreciating nature, in The Greenening, the player is actively growing it. It’s an incremental game that’s concerned with production, but only in your ability to help the planet. It reproduces the same comfort and fun the genre finds in repetition, but there isn’t a big number to watch continually tick up. You get the same dopamine hits of upgrading and unlocking abilities, but it’s not for capital production—it’s a completely different kind of growth.
Even unlockable abilities don’t feel as intrusive as the genre’s counterparts. In the demo, these include making your cloud hold more water, making your water droplets bigger, and the ability to regenerate water over time. Nothing is made faster; the pace of the game remains completely unchanged. After playing the demo for an hour, there seemingly aren’t any upgrades that intrude on the laid-back vibe of the game. Even when you unlock the majority of the ability tree, you’ll always be watering a landscape.
The result of these development decisions is an incremental game with a slower pace. It feels like a game that’s less concerned with grabbing your attention than others in the genre. When you water the landscape, you can click to make the droplets fall manually, or not click at all and let them fall freely in a natural rhythm. Letting the droplets fall naturally, together with the game’s soothing lo-fi synth, feels wonderfully meditative.
Calm over commerce
As much as The Greenening’s relaxing vibe would soothe the nastiest migraine, Schulze emphasizes how important it was to get the game’s progression system right. “Providing a nice and motivating flow through the entire experience is the core of the gene,” Schulze says. “All other aspects are second to that.”
This "core" of the genre is something that Schulze has learned from playing other games, a combination of genre classics and contemporary releases. “Nodebuster and Digseum are certainly the two games that kicked off the current wave of ‘short active incrementals,'" he says. “But my own story with incremental games goes way back to the earlier days of the genre. The first ones that sparked my interest were A Dark Room and Candy Box, both quite eye-opening games at the time. Some more recent favourites include Astro Prospector, Tower Wizard, and Far Fishing.”
It’s interesting how The Greenening achieves a balance of being laid-back while also following in the footsteps of the genre's predecessors with a steady stream of progression to motivate the player. These sentiments may seem totally opposite at first, but here they come together because of the game’s themes of gardening and nature.
Alongside restoring the planet and unlocking upgrades, you also have a garden where you can grow plants and flowers. A major part of progression in The Greenening is watching your garden grow bigger and bigger. These plants are the "idle" part of the game, as they collect resources that you can also spend on upgrades and abilities. However, the accumulation and development of resources take on a new meaning here. You are planting to regrow. You can even customize the layout of your garden, move your collected plant life, and change the colors of the flowers to learn into the more aesthetic elements of gardening, or you can just let everything grow randomly to embrace nature’s more rebellious side.
The Greenening is a relaxing incremental game, but its gardening mechanics subvert our understanding of the genre as a whole. It’s a game that totally reframes how we approach work processes and production in a way that’s both gentle and radical.
The Greenening is coming soon to the Epic Games Store.