Cauldron, a game about throwing a bunch of mixed ingredients into a pot and brewing something powerful, is a metaphor for itself

This Idle Game Cast A Spell On Me And I Don't Want Out

Cauldron, a game about throwing a bunch of mixed ingredients into a pot and brewing something powerful, is a metaphor for itself

Then, before your eyes, the minigames themselves start changing--first subtly, then so suddenly and radically that they become completely different genres. The apple-collecting minigame for example, starts fairly simply: You hold a basket and move back and forth collecting apples falling from trees. One of the first upgrades gives your sidekick his own basket to double your productivity. You get a fireball upgrade to blast the bad apples that detract from your score, and then monsters start to show up, so the fireballs work on them too. Before long, you get the ability to float around freely instead of merely back and forth. Your companion's basket gets so large that it covers the entire bottom screen and you no longer even need your own basket. Instead, now you're focused on aiming your fireballs. The bad apples become the fuel for upgradable turrets. Your fireballs become more rapid. After a few more upgrades, this simple apple-collecting minigame has turned into a frantic bullet-hell shooter, and you got to see every incremental step along the way that transformed it. It's a pretty incredible trick.

As you extend your reach even further into the darkness, the pace of your automated gathering quickens and the economy changes. Soon you're no longer paying 5 or 10 doodads for an upgrade, but 5 or 10 million, billion, or trillion. It satisfies the classic clicker formula without really being a clicker. Number go up.

Also as you extend your reach further into the darkness, you discover even more minigames. Uh oh. Two of them, including one Vampire Survivors-like, introduce even more resources to gather and their own upgrade trees. Others are puzzle or exploration challenges or a combat arena that grant you Spirit power to pay for permanent upgrades to all your party members. That makes your characters more powerful, which means they can take on even harder challenges, to uncover more darkness, to get more resources, to pay for better upgrades, to further iterate and transform the minigames.

I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of Cauldron. I know from some of the menus and reading up on the game that I'm only in the first default game mode, and that more modes with special conditions will unlock once I've finished it. Those modes then introduce further wrinkles to the minigames. I could see myself getting sucked in over and over to complete all the modes with specialized win conditions like Pacifism, in which you can't battle the monsters only--only bribe them.

Cauldron is the kind of surprising game I love, a treat that comes out of nowhere and suddenly occupies your mind and your gaming time, and one that feels tailor-made for playing while traveling or catching up with TV shows on your Steam Deck. It has cast a spell on me, and if you give it a little time, you'll get hexed too.

Disclosure: GameSpot and Fanatical are both owned by Fandom.

The Best Steam Deck Games To Play In 2025