LumberBoy is an incremental that knows when to slow down

Sometimes, I look at my Steam library, see all the incremental demos I've accumulated, and consider starting some kind of support group for fellow gamers who have an unhealthy obsession with the genre. I have a problem, I know, but that hasn't ever stopped me from seeking out new incrementals to try. And that's how I found LumberBoy. 

LumberBoy by Hidden Stage Games is a tree-chopping game that, while filling the “numbers go brrr” quota, also forces you to slow down and breathe in a way that's so well implemented, you could accidentally overlook it altogether. It's addictive, beautiful, and the demo is a perfect taster of things to come. 

A slower pace

I found the demo for LumberBoy during one of my daily trawls through the demo section on Steam. It's a pretty standard incremental: chop trees, sell the wood, purchase upgrades, chop trees quicker, make more money. There's nothing new or dazzling about the gameplay loop if you look at it that way, but what sets LumberBoy apart for me is what it does with the time between runs. 

In most incrementals, the money you've earned is immediately available to buy whichever upgrades you want or make sense, leaving you free to quickly dive into the next run. That's not the case in LumberBoy, with those in-between moments forcing you to slow down and wait. 

Because you cannot sell raw lumber. Everything you bring back from a run has to be refined into planks, which takes time depending on the type of wood and which upgrades you've unlocked. Once the planks are done, they are immediately sold to the shop where you can pick up the cash. 

I'm sure there's a min-maxing tip out there somewhere about going on a new run while you wait for the wood to be refined, but I chose not to do that. Instead, I'd load up the sawmill with wood and then just… wait. I used the time to help my daughter with some drawing, prep part of dinner, or simply stare off into space and think about the things I should be doing but was putting off in favor of chopping trees and watching numbers go brrr.

So much lumber, not enough space

Thanks to the pretty standard incremental loop, instructions are mostly unnecessary in LumberBoy, except when it comes to the storage system, which takes a moment to adjust to. 

You see, I've played a lot of incrementals, and I only need the fingers of one hand to count the ones that limit your capacity to collect outside of the standard timer that limits the length of the run. In LumberBoy, you're not only fighting time in the form of stamina, but you're also fighting a bizarrely fragile axe and not one but two forms of limited storage space. 

To begin with, you can initially only carry two stacks of five lumber in your backpack, with another two available in the main storage box, and that quickly results in a premature end to a run long before you run out of stamina. Even if your stamina depletes first, the lumber you pick up has to be transferred into the main storage box before you succumb to exhaustion or it's lost forever, so you need to plan accordingly and stick close to the box lest you end up with a backpack full of lumber and none to take home. 

You can upgrade your storage, of course. You can unlock new stacks for both your backpack and the main storage box, and increase how much lumber fits in a stack, but the worry of running out of space never really leaves you. There's nothing worse than sprinting back to the truck and hopping in, only to see chunks of log fly out of your pockets because you didn't transfer them in time. 

Number go ~sawmill noises~

One of the things that makes me obsess over incrementals in the way that I do is the run-by-run improvement, and LumberBoy provides that in a way that never disappoints, because those numbers never stop going up. Every run was better than the last.

It can be pretty frustrating when, in some incrementals, you manage to have a really solid run, but then you can't figure out how it happened or how to even begin recreating it. Luck often plays a central role in games of the genre, and it's very much a factor in LumberBoy too, but this lovely game puts most of the progress directly in your hands without the need to get lucky. 

Passing certain milestones, marked by unlocking a fixed number of upgrades, opens up new regions to explore with new, more valuable lumber to harvest. The milestones seem perfectly spaced to ensure you never plateau within a certain region before unlocking a new one, which makes the entire process feel so much less of an uphill battle. 

RNG comes into play a little, especially with the Shockwave ability that damages trees around the one you're actually hitting. There are also Golden Trees, which seem to spawn in place of another tree you've already felled. These precious trees are rare, but my goodness, they're lucrative. 

Where'd the time go?

I'm willing to admit that I got a little carried away with the demo, but I'm a sucker for a fully fleshed-out upgrade tree and find it hard to stop with one half-completed. I spent almost two hours playing the demo, but it felt like five minutes. The pacing in LumberBoy is honestly perfect, and I seem to have temporarily forgotten how time worked. 

LumberBoy was created entirely by hand by a team of developers who had “zero art experience”, which just makes it all the more impressive. Every pixel on the screen is perfectly placed, every animation is smooth, and there is not a single thing I can point to that needs improvement in my eyes. I just want more tree-chopping action, and I can't wait for the full release. 

According to the team's Reddit post about the game, LumberBoy is “aiming for a November release”, so hopefully I won't be waiting too long. In the meantime, In the meantime, I'll probably play the demo on Steam a few more times, and I'd highly recommend you try it too if incrementals make you happy.