Asbury Pines is an interesting little I-hesitate-to-call-it-a "game".

It's an "idler" of sorts. An "incremental game", if you are feeling sophisticated. It opens with a few characters in a sleepy Anywheresville, USA feeling town, including the local sherrif. Each character has a Live Life button, but to do that they need XP. You assign a character to "scavenge" (odd term to use, at least to start) resources, or to work a job to refine resources, or to explore a region to discover resources. XP is one of those resources.

So you assign the character to the job, and then the resources tick up at some rate based on some statistic that is on the character's sheet. (But let me assure you that you should not be wasting your time on this level of detail.) One of those resources you gather is XP. Get some of that, click Live Life, and that character stops working and starts living. (Man, let me tell ya.) Eventually, you get a little blip and see a tiny little micro-story around that character, and maybe unlock some other character or building.

When I say "micro-story", I mean it -- we're talking maybe a hundred words or two. This post itself is already longer than most of them. It starts simple enough, the local sherrif struggling to live up to the shadow cast by his father, a corrupt mayor, a sudden murder shocks the town. Each character has their own track of events, and occasionally they get blocked until you progress other tracks. Sometimes you stall out because you don't have the necessary resources for them to live their life. (Man, let me tell ya.)

The nature of the game means that you kind of unlock these fragments in a non-deterministic order, outside of the hard-coded blockers (which of course the developers have designed to keep some sort of coherence to things). It's an interesting effect on experiencing the story, piecing it together in little micro blips of text that come in no particular order. You hear allusions to the sherrif's blundering past. You learn just how cartoonishly the mayor is an asshole. You learn about the victim, wearing an eyepatch for reasons not quite explained, struggles with depression and alienation. You learn about the town's well-known vagrant with mental health issues, ranting and raving about the victim, the obvious suspect to the murder.

And then you unlock a new era, in the future, where an AI computer virus has destroyed all communications infrastructure, and society has crumbled.

I can't remember when or why I bought the game, but I hadn't even so much as read the store page on Steam in enough detail to know anything beyond "idler game that unlocks story about murder mystery", but I didn't quite expect what is going on with this game. As you unlock more eras along the timeline, both in the future and the past, this non-linear story actually became quite an engrossing meditation on life, society, how decisions result from past events and ripple forward to future events. The sherrif who seemed like the "main character" recedes to the background. Side characters grow in importance, in "hindsight". The murder mystery remains central, but when you think about it, the eye of the storm is pretty small compared to the rest of the wind whipping around. You start to see the story as about the history of a place, the history of society. You even unlock the perspective of animals, insects, plantlife. The perspective of multiple generations of human progress, as seen by a tree that spent centuries growing alongside it. The whole thing takes a bit of inspiration from Cloud Atlas, I would say. Maybe a bit of Anathem.

Now, I am not one to look down my nose at an idler game. I think they can be quite fun. Yes, you might just be watching numbers go up. But the challenge, such that there is, is making the numbers go up quickly and efficiently. Often there is a soft-reset mechanic whereby you start over with some more permanent boosts or perks, and can take the lessons you learned to get back to where you were faster, and break through an exponential curve by at least one more factor than the last time.

Asbury Pines is not a very good incremental game.

Like I said before, there's a bunch of "mechanics". Some people are better at some jobs than others, which affects how quickly they make the number go up when they are assigned to that job. Most jobs have a limited number of people that can do them, though, so as your character count reaches the dozens, you aren't crippled by optimization paralysis. The thing is, though, there is no "reset" mechanic, no exponential barriers you hit that make for an effective "game over". Which you'd think is good, but really makes the "game" part of this whole thing truly not a game.

I found myself loading the game up, upon which the game "simulates" a maximum of 12 hours of idle time of resource generation. This would have unlocked a handful of story bits. I'd read through them (though the game makes it harder to find where the new ones have popped up on the timeline than it had to). I'd re-assign some people based on who was blocked where. By the time I'd done all of the above, I'd probably have unlocked a few more things. I catch up on those. This would take all of ten to fifteen minutes. Maybe if I'm close to unlocking a few other things I'd hang around a bit longer. Then I'd sign out and come back the next day.

So the whole idle game of it all basically amounts to:

• Some random jitter in the order you encounter the story; and
• A throttle on the rate that you read the story.

There are some barriers to the game just finishing itself, beyond the artifical 12 hour idle limit. For one, you have to click that Live Life button when it becomes unlocked by whatever events. More interestingly, at least as a bit of "gameplay", is that obtaining the resource you specifically need to live your life is harder than you'd think, and often involves having invested in generating it in a past era. (Man, let me tell ya.) There is a mechanic whereby surplus of a resource in one era is carried over to a future era at some discounted rate. So sometimes, you need to specifically fine-tune something. I need more widgets in the future, so let's stop consuming them as much in the past. Which means I'm maybe not making as many sprockets, which might become a problem later. All that sounds like it could be a fun logistics problem; I assure you it is not. Just fix what you need next, walk away for the day, then come back and do it again.

Asbury Pines is technically in early access, for whatever that's worth; I don't really care. The story content is 100% complete, they are just spending their time tweaking all the above gameplay elements. Best of luck to them, I guess. Not sure I see how they make it any more interesting. I think it just fundamentally doesn't get what makes an idler game appealing.

By the tail end of things, even the narrative kind of lost its mojo. Maybe unavoidable, but as the story converges on the ending, the whole rich tapestry of interwoven, non-linear micro-stories kind of turns into something a bit more focused and plotty, and far less interesting to me. So when I'm getting close to the finish line, and I more or less know the general shape of how things are going to go, it's especially irritating that I'm blocked until I make some more stone or whatever and take one of these enforced breaks.

Something I've believed for a while now is that narratives in video games, taken in isolation, can never be as good as something in written or filmed media. But by bringing interactivity to the scene, a video game can elevate a mediocre story to something more impactful. I'll never watch your dumb Final Fantasy 7 anime, but I'll absolutely watch your dumb Final Fantasy 7 anime when I have to select Attack/Magic/Item from a menu in between the bits.

So is Asbury Pines a good video game? I dunno. Is it a brilliant story? Well, there was definitely a window there where I was enthralled, and occasionally moved. But maybe if it had all been laid bare, it's a long-winded way of telling an okay short story knockoff of Cloud Atlas. Maybe putting a bunch of artificial barriers in the way of doing what you want to do tricks you into thinking what you want to do was worth doing in the first place. Man, let me tell ya.

Three Stars.

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Asbury Pines is the:

• 18th greatest Video Game of all time.
• 36th greatest Thing of all time.