All Hail The Orb Review: Quacking Under Pressure
Stumbling upon a plain gray rock in a dungeon quickly turns into a delightful afternoon of managing a tiny pixel art flock.
All Hail The Orb serves as a lighthearted incremental game developed by LeGingerDev with a wonderfully absurd premise. You start by finding a gray orb trapped deep in a dungeon. Clicking it a few times turns it a bright, cheerful purple and accidentally frees a tiny follower. This little buddy informs you that their master remains stuck inside the rock. Breaking them out requires pouring massive amounts of devotion into the orb by expanding your flock, unlocking new rooms, and automating your resource gathering. It feels incredibly casual and offers a thoroughly enjoyable few hours of clicking and upgrading.
Automating the Flock
The core loop stays remarkably fresh by constantly introducing new mechanics at a steady pace. You begin by manually clicking the orb to generate devotion. Once you build up enough faith, you can summon your own little pixel art cultists. These folks automatically gather resources alongside you, taking a lot of the pressure off your clicking finger. They run on a basic energy meter and occasionally need to walk over to a bed to rest. You can eventually upgrade their efficiency and build enough infrastructure to completely automate the early stages.
Progression revolves around leveling up the dungeon itself. Hitting specific milestones unlocks the obelisk, which acts as the main gatekeeper for the five distinct stages of the adventure. Each new stage requires a massive resource sacrifice to open new rooms and reveal additional mechanics. It operates as a really smart system that keeps things easy to understand by locking the more complex features behind a gentle progression curve.
A Self-Contained Adventure
All Hail The Orb completely ditches the standard prestige system found in the incremental genre. 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 delightfully contained and respects your time. I managed to roll the credits and grab every single achievement in just under six hours.
A Few Bumps in the Road
The game handles its varied resources surprisingly well for the most part, though things get a bit confusing when the duck gacha arrives. As you unlock new rooms, you eventually gain access to ducks that generate a specific type of energy used for a late game skill tree. The energy generation here is glacially slow. Even if you merge your ducks up to the highest rarity, you'll end up waiting a very long time to unlock those final passive boosts. I found that the pacing drags in this specific menu. Thankfully, I eventually just ignored the duck portal entirely and still managed to beat the game without much friction.
You'll also run into a bit of annoying UI clutter as your automation scales up. The game loves to throw notification icons on buildings the second an upgrade is available, which feels a bit distracting when you just want to let things idle. There's also a persistent pop-up that appears every time a cultist finishes resting. Your little followers eventually learn to walk back to their stations automatically, yet the pop-up stays on your screen for the entire playthrough. Expect some minor performance drops and lag once you have a ton of entities moving around on screen near the end of your run, too.
The Verdict
All Hail The Orb knows exactly what it wants to be. It delivers a bite sized, charming incremental adventure that skips endless resets to offer a genuinely concise experience. The duck mechanics feel underbaked and the UI gets cluttered, but the core loop of upgrading your dungeon and expanding your flock remains incredibly satisfying. For the price of a coffee, it provides a perfectly relaxing afternoon of upgrading and clicking.
Score: 8.0/10 A wonderfully odd little clicker that treats your time with respect.
We at NLM received a key for this game for free, this however didn't impact our review in any way.
