This relaxing take on Civilization wrapped in Windows 2000 style just hit 1.0, it's completely free, and I'm mesmerized

Civilization 7 hasn't gone according to plan. Sitting at 'mixed' reviews on Steam, it's a shadow of its predecessor, which sits at 'very positive' with over 100,000 community critiques. Though I'm sure that didn't go down a storm on release, either. And while you won't have to look far to find people clamoring for the golden age of the best 4X games out there, seeing a homage built with the look of classic grey and blue Windows operating systems, I'd usually say "not like this." So why can't I take my eyes off CivIdle? Yes, like this actually. Exactly like this. Thank you, FishPond at Fish Pond Studio. You absolute genius.

CivIdle is almost exactly what you think it is - a slow and steady take on Sid Meier's Civilization that goes on, and on, and on in the background, complete with music I mistook for my chill work playlist. You take the reins whenever you want, directing your people down tech trees and across continents, trading and waging war based on your own goals, strengths, and diplomatic decisions. Historical figures like J. P. Morgan and Florence Nightingale offer Production and Happiness perks (in that order), and your plans to grow your empire climb through the Bronze Age all the way to today's Information Age. It's Civ, only if it were made by an IT worker messing around in Excel to make themselves look busy as their clueless boss slowly walks by.

First made playable just two short years ago, a news post this time last month, titled "Road To 1.0", announced that CivIdle's next patch wouldn't be 0.28, but 1.0. And with said patch landing just yesterday, the road ahead was clearly more akin to a short walk down to the shops than a drive down a long and winding highway that some early access games send themselves on.

So what sets CivIdle apart? Well, just look at it. There's an abject lack of color here. The hex-based world lacks grass to touch and an ocean for me to get hopelessly lost in during a vain attempt to dodge some barbarians. It's there. It's all there. It just looks… different. Simple. But not. The side menus harken back to the days of browsing a severely limited world encyclopedia loaded off a 700MB CD-ROM. And don't get me started on floppy discs.

The gray, blocky windows in CivIdle are a forlorn sight against the rounded blue corners of Windows XP or the stained-glass transparency of Windows Vista that would slowly soften into the gradients of today's GUIs. Scrolling through the tangled web of tech trees triggers flashbacks to high-school database management, with simple icons that wouldn't have been out of place on the vaporware that was the wacky school-sanctioned graphics design program I used as a kid at the turn of the millennium. It's giving Windows 2000 core, and yes, I do want to throw up after even thinking that phrase.

But don't worry. You're not going to have to bust out an archaic understanding of BASIC when Ghandi gets a little trigger-happy with the nuclear arms again. At least, not that I can tell from the CivIdle Steam page, anyway. What I can tell is that CivIdle is going down a storm, with close to 50 recent reviews putting it in clear sight of moving up from 'mostly positive' to 'very positive.'

With Steam recommending it to me based on my well-documented love of Against the Storm, who am I to say no? And with Mr. FishPond quoting Churchill to say that 1.0 "is not even the beginning of the end," there's clearly more to come; though he is working on an interplanetary take on CivIdle with a slightly more modern UI, too, so there's that.

Best of all, CivIdle is completely free. What I thought was a demo on Steam turns out to be the full game. All of it. You can chuck five bucks to the developer with the Supporter Pack if you choose, and getting cross-platform cloud saves is a little $1.50 unlock that's so small it's both adorable and likely impossible for our mysterious benefactor FishPond to actually benefit from. That means you can make your fancy smartphone look like an early 2000s Windows CE PDA, too. It takes me back.