All Hail The Orb Review: Quacking Under Pressure
I never expected to find myself managing an underground cult dedicated to a glowing rock, but here we are.
All Hail The Orb is a short, lighthearted incremental game developed by LeGingerDev. The premise is delightfully absurd. You stumble upon a gray orb trapped in a dungeon, click it until it glows purple, and accidentally free a tiny follower who informs you that their master is still stuck inside. To break them out, you need to pour massive amounts of devotion into the orb by slowly building a cult, unlocking new dungeon rooms, and automating your resource gathering. It's an incredibly casual experience, and for a few bucks, it offers a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon of clicking and upgrading.
Building the Flock
The core loop is exactly what you'd expect from the genre, but it manages to stay fresh by constantly introducing new mechanics.
You start by manually clicking the orb to generate devotion. Before your fingers fall off, you can use that devotion to summon cultists. These little pixel-art guys automatically gather resources alongside you. They run on an energy meter, meaning they occasionally have to walk over to a bed to rest. You can eventually upgrade their efficiency and build enough infrastructure to completely automate the early game.
Progression is tied to leveling up the dungeon. As you hit specific milestones, you unlock the obelisk, which acts as the main gatekeeper for the five distinct stages of the game. Each stage requires a massive resource sacrifice to open new rooms and reveal new mechanics. It's a smart system that prevents you from getting overwhelmed by locking the more complex systems behind a steady progression curve.
A Lack of Prestige
Unlike almost every other incremental game on the market, All Hail The Orb completely ditches the prestige system. You never have to wipe your progress to gain a permanent multiplier. You just keep pushing forward until you hit the credits. This makes the entire experience feel much more contained. I managed to roll the credits and grab every achievement in just under six hours.
Ducking the Issue
The game handles its varied resources surprisingly well, until it decides to introduce the duck gacha.
As you unlock new rooms, you eventually gain access to ducks. These feathered friends generate a specific type of energy used for a late-game skill tree. The problem is that the energy generation is glacially slow. Even if you merge your ducks up to the highest rarity, you're going to be waiting a long time to unlock those final passive boosts. It honestly feels like the pacing completely falls apart in this specific menu. I eventually just ignored the duck portal entirely and still managed to beat the game without much friction.
Before you get too comfortable with the automation, you also need to prepare yourself for some annoying UI clutter. The game loves to throw notification icons on buildings the second an upgrade is available. It feels like an assault on the senses when you're just trying to let the game idle. There's also a persistent pop-up that appears every time a cultist finishes resting. The cultists eventually learn to walk back to their stations automatically, but the pop-up stays on your screen for the entire playthrough. You'll also notice some performance drops and lag once you have a ton of entities on screen near the end of your run.
The Verdict
All Hail The Orb knows exactly what it wants to be. It's a bite-sized, charming incremental game that respects your time by avoiding endless prestige resets. While the duck mechanics feel underbaked and the UI can get annoying, the core loop of upgrading your dungeon and expanding your cult is incredibly satisfying. It won't replace your favorite 100-hour RPG, but for the price of a coffee, it fits the bill perfectly.
Score: 8.0/10 A wonderfully odd little clicker that fits the bill perfectly.
We at NLM received a key for this game for free, this however didn't impact our review in any way.
