All Hail the Orb Review

At first glance, All Hail the Orb — developed by LeGinger Dev and published by GrabTheGames — seems like your typical idle game where the main activity is constantly clicking on something. That may be how it starts, but I was pleasantly surprised that there is so much more here to do!

All Hail the Orb is a game that is centred around powering a mysterious, glowing Orb. We begin the game by clicking on the Orb sitting on the Altar; click enough times, and you set a little creature free. The problem is that they were trapped in there with their Master, who is still stuck. To set them free, the Orb must grow. This, in turn, requires summoning cultists and exploring the dungeon with a variety of quirky rooms, unlocking automation as the Devotion collected from the Orb increases. This is great as you don’t have to sit there clicking non-stop.

For controls, All Hail the Orb is primarily played with a mouse, and to navigate around the dungeon, the screen moves wherever you move your cursor. To harvest Devotion Crystals from the Orb, you click on it, or you can just hold the left button down to do it continuously for you. The scroll wheel is used to zoom in and out, so you can fit as much of the dungeon on the screen as you want.

To help you out, you can assign cultists to work (click on them to pick them up and drag them there) to channel Devotion automatically. Essentially, they click on the Orb, so you don’t need to. You can have up to five minions working on collecting this resource for you at once. They do get tired after a while, so it’s handy to have a couple of extra workers to take over while the others rest and refill their stamina. As you progress in the game, you will unlock other resources to harvest, like Life Essence, Mushrooms, and Duck Coins. So you will need many cultists working to help you gather everything.

When you get further in the game, you unlock the Cultist Quarters, where you can place beds for all your cult members to snooze and regenerate. In the beginning, you have to drag them from whatever they are working on to the bed to make them rest, but you can upgrade it so that the workers will automatically come to the bed when they are exhausted and, when they are fully rested, head back to work.

The Altar that holds the Orb can be powered up by clicking on it, and you can increase the Devotion Power, which makes each click count for two, or the Resonating Devotion, which increases overall devotion from the Orb. Upgrading these increases the number of points you receive rapidly, which is used to summon more cultists or power them up to make them more efficient, getting you more points to spend as you go.

The look of All Hail the Orb is great; I would call it neon pixel. All the pixelated sprites are cute, and the colours of everything, like the environments, are vivid and glowing. The cultists that you summon look the same, as they all have the same red cloak, but that makes sense. Despite this, they all have their own unique names, stats, and personalities. As you play, you will unlock ducks and a ton of them too, and a large variety of them: some with hats, others with unique colours, and even ghost duckies. It’s so fun to see them wandering around the dungeon.

If you need to quit your game, you don’t have to worry about losing your progress or everything that you have collected and unlocked. All Hail the Orb autosaves, so you can leave and come back, starting exactly where you left off, with everyone hard at work and resource collection continuing.

This is a short and sweet title that will probably take you between four to six hours to complete, but this is a fun and goofy time! All Hail the Orb is silly, with a light-hearted tone that gives all the characters you interact with a fun personality. I love how the only thing the cultists can think about is pizza! I enjoyed the gameplay loop, and I didn’t find that I was spending exorbitant amounts of time grinding; everything goes pretty fast once you play through the first few minutes of the game and start upgrading the Orb and Altar.

There is so much to do in All Hail the Orb that it does not feel like your standard idle game. I was always moving from room to room, managing the collection of resources and upgrading all my workers and Altars to make them as efficient as they could be. It is addictive and full of personality (and ducks); it’s hard to put down until you have completed the full game. Though, if you want more, there are a lot of achievements to unlock as you play that you can try to collect.