LORED Stick figures, big numbers, dark jokes

Every worker here is a hand-drawn stick figure called a LORED, and there are 63 of them, each with its own animation. They mine Iron, Copper and other resources, including one called Malignancy, which is exactly as reassuring as it sounds. The catch: leveling a LORED doubles what it produces and doubles what it eats, so every upgrade is a small bet on your own economy. Keep them fueled or the whole operation stalls. Between shifts, the LOREDs think out loud, reply to each other, and are happy to argue with you if you start one. The humor runs on absurdity and dark comedy, and it does get edgy at times, so your mileage may vary. You can also just not talk to them and let them work.

At heart this is a numbers-go-up game, but the numbers go up because you built the machine that pushes them. You buy upgrades across four Stages, each a deeper layer of the economy, and the most powerful ones consume your current host and demand a prestige to reach. Early on you push production by hand; later, automation takes over and your job becomes supervising a system that hums along generating more than you could ever click. It sits comfortably between active and idle: enough to tinker with while a show plays, and it keeps progressing in the background if you leave it running. Since 2019 it has been rebuilt from the ground up with new upgrade trees, and the pacing is well balanced, with real surprises still waiting in the later Stages.