Fortune Mill Review (PC)

Fortune favors the bold, though I’m not entirely sure if I’m bold, reckless, or simply out of my depth. To be honest, I’m not entirely convinced that there is a pot of gold at the end of the road. All I know is that there’s a toad, an unfathomably high paywall, and a whole lot of scratch cards and incremental opportunities to earn a quick buck along the way. I also seem to have a way with earning large sums of cash, despite having no sense of how the piggy bank even works. But, maybe that’s Fortune Mill in a nutshell: a game that cradles wealth, yet lacks the resources or the energy to fill you in on the details about how to earn it.

Fortune Mill is an odd game, that much is evident. It’s odd, not because it fosters a tax-dodging toad or a multi-armed monstrosity, but because it doesn’t quite belong to any underling in the gambling field. The idea might be the same—to earn millions of coins to further fuel your incremental addiction—but the act of obtaining enough funds, however, is a little out of the ordinary. And by out of the ordinary I mean, it mostly involves completing random arcade mini-games and splurging cash on all sorts of otherworldly perks. But that’s sort of what makes it special: it’s unpredictable, it’s quirky, and it’s about as nonsensical as it claims to be.

It all started with a handful of darts, a color-coded board, and an enormous rat that had no intention of letting me through to the next gate. A quick throw later, I had a few pieces of gold, a vague idea of what I was doing, and a debt that, for some reason, had yet another million reasons for me to throw even more darts. It was around that point where, similar to Loan Shark, I realized that it was an impossible task that I’d never be able to accomplish. But then, the benefits soon started to appear from behind the veil of a futile battle—the small upgrades that would allow me to double the score, multiply the power of the darts, and earn a ludicrous amount of cash. After coming to that conclusion, I figured it would be a doddle. But then, almost as if to rain on my parade, the frog came along.

Fortune Mill never really asked a great deal, though it did source numerous ways to make that ever-elusive target feel a million credits away. In one moment I’d be earning a generous amount of gold. But in another, I’d be unintentionally finding a new game to hurl the darts at, a new guardian to bribe, and a boatload of passive upgrades to unlock. And I suppose, for the most part, that’s all that Fortune Mill was: playing short games, earning upgrades, and slowly adapting to a paywall that, in my mind, didn’t have an apex. With that, a simple routine found its place, and the experience gradually descended into a perpetual cycle of mindless gambling and earning gold for mythical creatures. I never really understood it, but that never stopped me from wanting to pay the piper, so to speak.

Aside from the dartboard and the million dollar toll, Fortune Mill also gave me a handful of activities and perks to throw a bit of extra cash at. Scratch cards, for example, gave me more gold, whereas the perks that I chose to unlock in the previous activity would either boost my revenue or prevent it from skyrocketing. To that end, I had a choice to make: to unlock passive perks that would potentially elevate my fortune, or keep it from rolling over to an indescribable amount. The thing with Fortune Mill is that, being a game that doesn’t exactly lay all of its cards out on the table for you, you never truly know where the next room will be, much less what it will involve. But then, I guess that’s half the fun here: guessing how the game will unfold in the near term.

Of course, if you’re expecting a gameplay-heavy gig, then you might be in for a rude awakening here. Given that most of the game involves bite-sized mini-games and incremental changes in the way each activity plays out, there isn’t a huge amount for you to do in this world. In fact, it mostly consists of rolling with the punches and watching your gold pile up with various multipliers and passive upgrades. But other than that, what you see here is what you get: a pack of idle clicking games that, true to the point of the genre, require you to click, grind, and accrue wealth. To be honest, it’s best not to delve any deeper than that.

For the short amount of time that Fortune Mill sticks around on the block, it can be entertaining to mull over. Entertaining, but never quite compelling. With a simple concept and a handful of familiar clicking mini-games, it never truly goes above and beyond to capture a brilliant idea. A fun way to spend twenty or thirty minutes, sure — but that’s about it. And so, it’s worth taking Fortune Mill with a grain of salt. Sure, it’s a little wacky and comical, but I can’t say that it does a lot more than what the average idle clicker does already.

Verdict

Fortunately for Fortune Mill, a lack of originality in its gameplay department works in its favor, not because it’s familiar, but because it makes the simple act of becoming a multi-millionaire a surmountable feat that anyone can accomplish. It might not be the greatest game to ever wrangle mini-games and rogue-like perk cards into the one pen, but to give credit where credit is due, it does manage to provide a lot of bite-sized thrills in its incremental form. A game changer? No. But a fun idle clicker that can keep you mindlessly distracted for thirty or forty minutes? Absolutely.

Provided that you can embrace Fortune Mill with a lick of salt, you should be able to scrape just enough joy out of it to make the rather steep asking price feel somewhat reasonable. With that being said, I wouldn’t expect a perfect game here. A distracting one, sure, but nothing more than that.