Gameplay

This is an incrementer in the style of Cookie Clicker or Cow Clicker. The basic incrementer is where you click a thing (a cookie or a cow) to make your score go up by one. Then you can spend your score so each click gives you more score, or to buy things that click for you. The multipliers get increasingly absurd, clicking itself is increasingly useless as millions and billions of clicks per second happen for you. There is no way to win, you just keep pushing your score higher and higher.

The whole genre was created to show how absurd casual gaming is, and it created a monster. It has been likened to Sisyphus endlessly pushing his stone up a hill. Why fight it?!

Gameplay begins with Sisyphus, some stones, and a hill. Clicking Sisyphus causes him to throw a small stone over a hill and you get a point. Clicking a larger stone rapidly causes Sisyphus to push it up the hill, when it reaches the top it rolls down the other side and you get multiple points. Points are counted in stones.

Stones can then be spent on items which throw and roll stones for you, or they make throwing and rolling stones more efficient. There are several different types of stones and ways to get them over the hill providing the opportunity for multiple different trees to items.

As rocks roll off the right side of the screen, they reappear in Sisyphus' pile on the left. This effect should be fairly subtle, but in keeping with the endless and pointless nature of his task.

Characters interact with Sisyphus, sometimes of their own accord, sometimes as part of gameplay. For example, Brodin might show up and huck a ton of stones for Sisyphus for 30 seconds before he has to run off to the big Frost Giant vs Acer game.

While there is no way to win the game, Zeus has promised Sisyphus that he can leave purgatory if he gets enough stones over the hill. A progress meter, with no scale, is provided. The scale is logarithmic so it will advance quickly and first and then slower and slower and slower even as the player's SPS increases wildly. The end point may be infinity, or the goal post may recede; both of these mechanics are meant to be subtle enough that a casual player doesn't notice. More overtly, Zeus and Persephone may find ways to penalize Sisyphus. Point is, you can't win but you THINK you can win.

Sisyphus is an anti-hero, and while he may think he's successfully cheated the system, no matter how many stones he pushes or how many ways he tricks the system, he can never win. This may be overt, or the game may leave the player with a feeling as well that they're "winning" while leaving the realization that it's all a joke on them up to their own self-realization.