For as addicting as Idle Clicker games are, a key component to that addiction is a sense of fun and the feeling that you're going somewhere or doing something with all that frenetic clicking.

Voodoo Garden is not one of those games. I spent my time with the game clicking away, collecting leaves and fruits and snake teeth, all while feeling robbed of any fun.

I will admit to you that I find myself occasionally addicted to Clickers whenever they become available. For those who stay away from them (I appreciate the self-control), let me tell you a bit about them. Typically, you're trying to amass a certain commodity - as much as humanly possible. A lot of time it's money, sometimes it's candy, and sometimes it's fish. Either way, you must buy upgrades that allow you to collect more *object* faster and quicker. Once you have all of the *object*, you just...you know...get more of it. This genre excels particularly well on mobile devices because it allows you to check up on your progress at any time during the day.

When a Clicker game...clicks, it's because it... taps into a need to collect more and more, and the upgrades feed into that addiction by feeling like you're making some amount of substantial progress, even if it, in fact, means nothing at all. Voodoo Garden does little to capitalize on this need we, as humans, have to have everything. When we want things we want it fast and we want it now. But we also want it to mean something.

You're presented with a garden with very charming looks that initially draws you in, but then you realize how shallow the game actually is. If I knew going in knowing it was a clicker, I could have coped better with its inanity. I thought it was going to be more of a gardening sim with a cutesy aesthetic. That isn't to say the clicker element is what turned me off so quickly; it's the fact that there's little that's unique to the game’s mechanics.

I may be addicted to the genre, but that doesn't mean shortly after installing these games on my phone, I play them constantly for about a week; working out my fingers’ tapping skills. However, once my upgrades start hitting a limit and the *object* starts flowing slower, I tend to bid adieu and delete it off my phone, making room for another one.

In Voodoo Garden, these mechanics and all that you can do is presented right up front, and you can immediately see that the progress to be had will be an expected journey down a rabbit hole of clicking and upgrading.

When trying to amass money to buy more plants to harvest, you start to realize that the income is coming much slower than you would hope. There's always some kind of “auto-clicker”/”auto-collector” in these games and in here, they don't seem to be nearly as effective as one would like. It's certainly one of those things where doing the clicking yourself would prove just as efficient, if not more. The idea of “idling” this game would make things take exponentially longer, and I don't think that's something you'd wanna do.

To talk a little more positively for just a moment here, the game does do a good job in the charm department, though. The fauna and flora have a cutesy style to them, and it is all very coherent. Taking all that into consideration, Voodoo Garden’s charm is only skin deep. The visuals are good, but it also feels very quickly made and reminiscent of a flash game - especially the game’s UI.

One strange addition, in keeping with the theme of voodoo, the game’s auto collectors are spirits of animals that you've sacrificed. Yes. You sacrifice animals in here. But don't worry, it's not as bad as it sounds! You first need to feed them full of leaves and other produce to make them fat enough. Once they hit that level of cute chubbiness, go ahead and murder them in a sacrificial attempt to get more crops!

The game also has some strange weather mechanics that cause a bunch of rainfall to impede your harvesting by...scaring the ghosts? Because ghosts are against rain? I don't know why they're not okay with it when you have bees still flying around. It doesn't make too much sense.

Personally, I feel a little let down by the game’s attempt to make a clicker, as awful as that sounds. It's certainly something I shouldn't be let down about, but it is. Some people have a bigger love for these types of games than I do, but the fact is, the game is still very shallow and nowhere near as deep or rewarding as some of the other clickers out there today and for free, too.