Combining creature collection with incremental and idle game mechanics into a single package, Winmon sits unsuspectingly at the bottom of your screen. However, with a plot to overthrow your king and multiple skill trees, there’s a lot more here than first meets the eye.
Feed The King
You are introduced to the Winmon mechanics through a variety of quests. Through them, you meet the king and his request for food in exchange for minimal gold. Thankfully, you can hire creatures to help you farm resources and place facilities to process them into more profitable items.
Your Winmon work automatically until they become hungry or tired. Then you need to drop food for them to eat or let them rest before they return to work. However, working hard to feed your greedy overlords soon wears thin.
Defeat The King
The ultimate goal here is to build up your workforce until they are strong enough to defeat the king and overthrow his regime. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make use of his facilities in the meantime. The king’s men offer players delivery requests which yield evolution stones upon delivery. These are used to evolve your Winmon or to unlock things in the skill trees.
It’s unlikely you will be able to defeat the king without resetting a good few times to unlock the currency for the skill tree. Often in incremental games, I can’t figure out when the best time for this is, but I felt like the quests naturally built towards points to do so.
Shake The Foundations
Winmon is designed to be played with a mouse. You can drag the screen to either side to reach new areas of the map and collect resources by running your mouse over them. However, I often found myself picking up items by accident, which wouldn’t be too bad if cancelling the action didn’t make it rebuild each time. Aside from that, anything I found lacking or frustrating was patched before launch.
As much as I enjoyed playing Winmon, I think it’s important to highlight its incremental nature over idle. Having it running on my computer didn’t help my productivity, since there is always something to do and it requires a fair amount of micromanaging as you build up. Leaving it running has no downsides, though, so it could still work as a workplace companion for those with more focus than I.
Overthrown The Overlord
After losing to the king a few times, I found my stride and nursed my Winmon back to an optimal build. Unfortunately, this is where Winmon kind of lost me.
Incremental games are designed to be reset and rebuilt over and over, but here it felt more like punishment for failing to defeat the king. Building up your base and team isn’t as simple as clicking things and watching the numbers go up either. Starting over felt more like wiping my Pokémon games, so I was less inclined to reset and start over. As an idle game though, I really enjoyed Winmon.
To Victory
Winmon has all the hallmarks of a great incremental game, but I feel it falls short on the dopamine hits I would expect. I feel the idle, creature-collector mechanics muddy the waters somewhat when compared to the likes of Pibcremental and Petal by Petal, which can be finished within a few hours. The pixel-art design is colourful and charming, and the animations bring life to the bottom of your screen.
If you are looking for a slow-burn idle game with a little bit of base building, creature management and a whole lot of grinding, then Winmon is the bottom-of-the-screen game for you.
Platforms: PC
Publishers: IndieLab, Phoenix Game, Smilegate
Developers: IndieLab
Played On: Steam
Key Provided By: PressEngine
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