{Review} Ridiculous History

"Ridiculous History" by Daniel Trevin

Slightly ridiculous, slightly impractical, slightly... interesting.

Story
It is the great story of mankind, a civilization, led by you. From simple tools to spacefaring...
Keep that grand sweep in mind, because this will tax your imagination. Most of "Ridiculous History" plays out with text and icons. You play until the year 2015, then you are presented with a score and get the choice to do it all again.

Mechanics
From the screenshots, I expected something like a cookie clicker, and while there is some idle gaming in this game's DNA, it respects your time much more than others do. You get the chance to speed up time by factors four and eight. This is an option you want to use, as the interaction is rather limited.
In the research window, you choose between 5 random technologies to discover. They may give you military power, gold, science, points, population or cities.
Except for population, none of these things grow by themselves, so you are dependent on the rewards of research and events.
You have cities with population and population caps, also food supply, represented by a positive or a negative number. You can build buildings in your city for a one-off bonus, provided you have unlocked the technology and own enough gold.
Sometimes the game throws a choice at you, for example pirates are raiding your shores. You can either take a hit in the resource department or, if you have unlocked sailing, spend some military power to chase them off.
These events are rather interesting, but their balance seems a bit off. If you have researched archery, a village competition awards you 300 gold in prize money. For researching industrialization and taking your civilization into a new era... you get 200 gold.
Be aware that these events might screw you over. My first playthrough started with me taking some time to research masonry. Within a few seconds, a banking crisis wiped out all my gold and left me with crippling debt and terrorists killed the population of my two starting town. Before I knew what had happened, the game was over in the year 313 and my score was... 2.
As for the "Ridiculous" of the title... It certainly has that. "Illogical" might also be a way to put it. That I researched chain restaurants before gunpowder... Yeah, okay. But banks before currency and computers before electricity is stretching things. As I said, if your imagination is up to the task, there is enjoyment here, painting mental pictures of water-powered computers and bank safes full of lifestock, because your civilization is still on the barter system and the chicken standard.

Presentation
Icons and text and electronic music. Not much else to report here, except that the tutorial is a wall of text.

On the whole...

A bit like an idle game without clicking, "Ridiculous History" nails the "oh, yeah, I'll just research this one additional tech..." feeling. At the end of the day, it's a piece of popcorn. It won't nourish you, but you don't expect it to.
Just be prepared for its strange logic and rather static resources.
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Link: http://contest.gamedevfort.com/submission/578#.VdBiNvntlBc

Dev: Daniel Trewin

Time Played: 20 minutes

Got My Vote? Yes, because it succeeds at what it sets out to do: Keep you clicking one more upgrade.