How To Grow a Black Hole Reviews

For the price point, you get a LOT of bang for your buck. There's a lot of game here for very little money. The graphics are gorgeous and the sound is really really good. However, there is a big issue in that it is extremely difficult to see how the various systems interact. BH Mass, Disk Matter, Accretion Energy, and the Disk Pressure all interplay in ways that are completely opaque to the player. This means that most the effects and consequences of the black hole powerups and improvements are effectively meaningless to me. Since I don't know what they do, it becomes a matter of "click on whatever is cheapest". The UI is pretty good although the vast majority of the game is spent in a little tiny scroll box on the right side of the screen (black hole powerups). One big improvement is making that easier to navigate. Another large wart is the "curvature research" screen. It's very pretty but the items are spread WAY apart and it is very hard to navigate. Tighten that up. A lot.

I love incremental games, but this one does not do it for me. I feel that the forced rebirth (or collapse) is really just a half baked solution to prolong the gameplay. I was also expecting that the collapse researches would help prolong the time until next collapse significantly, but with the autobuyer on, I was still getting around 100 collapse after spending around 2 days worth of offline progress. While the game has really great visuals, the rest is unoptimized and not balanced properly. As a side note, I would like to say that, although I only have 16GB of RAM, this is one of a few games that were terminated because of insufficient RAM in less than an hour. The only other game that was able to do this was Minecraft All the Mods 11 to the sky modpack where it was far more expectable then here.

The tutorial needs a lot of work. It was too much too fast, and I didn't understand it. The UI was cluttered and it overwhelms new players. It needs to be reworked to start with a simpler UI and unlock more as you progress. Also, I collapsed black holes in under a minute, I feel like it should take longer.

There is No AI in the making of the game, I mentioned an issue with FPS and the frame cap not applying and got a notification not long after explaining a hotfix coming on the same day correcting it. Otherwise the gameplay is smooth and requires you to read and juggle a few things to ensure stability of the black hole otherwise you may get a melt down. you can play this game while asleep too because it continues farming without force collapsing while you're away. Very nice game with beautiful graphics. Will be playing more!

Game is as advertised, fun idler. I do have some performance issues for some reason, I have a quite beefy PC (specs will be listed) and I only seem to get ~30 fps when tabbed into the game, however when my cursor is moved outside of the game screen I get a proper 200-300 fps. pls fix :) Edits: 1. This is an issue with the fullscreen mode of the game. If you are having the same issue, take the game out of fullscreen mode. 2. Formatting.

Performance issues kind of make sense, it's a react app running in electron. It's asking a lot for basically a web page. You can even redirect it to chrome's dev tools which is kind of cool to play around with. (%command% --remote-debugging-port=9222 --remote-allow-origins=https://chrome-devtools-frontend.appspot.com in extra parameters, then you can browse to it in chrome via localhost:9222) Upgrades are a bit hit and miss. A lot of "6% better for this one niche thing!", not a crazy amount of "Massive game changing feature!". The autobuy targets whatevers lowest price from the source upgrades, completely ignores black hole upgrades (at least early game), so you end up fighting it to try and sneak those in. The later upgrades to try to buy sources more aggressively really didn't seem to do a lot. Didn't feel like I had a lot of agency beyond wait long enough for next upgrade to make number bigger. The UI is lovely to look at, just could use some scaling up in a lot of areas. Text is very hard to read. Graphics, it's okay? I'd love to see more of the weight of my decisions, rather than slightly bigger thing on slightly different angle circling my now slightly bigger black hole. By the end of 50 minutes I realised I'd just been holding space and left click so I could watch a number go higher. I couldn't imagine waiting for this game to get anyway without manual matter deploying. Not for me, but hopefully they clean up the leaderboard and the much more patient people can have a proper go at it and show their true mastery of number go up.

For some reason even with my build, performance is abysmal for an idle game. with my CPU jumping to 97c on the lowest settings @ 30fps 1080p just to see if it'll lower temps, and despite having set the game to 30fps, it ignores that and still runs at 240fps??? with both the steam overlay and in-game performance overlay confirming that despite the frame cap set to 30fps, it still runs at 240. I have no idea why an idle game needs to overheat my cpu or why it ignores the graphics settings from the little I've managed to actually play however, resets happen far too fast and upgrades don't feel impactful at all. allegations removed after developer cleared up the confusions, I hope his game succeeds with further development, but at this moment in time I still cannot recommend due to the strange performance issues.

This is actually my very first review because wow, this game genuinely barely runs. I couldn't care less regarding AI use primarily because I couldn't even get far enough to see more, I gave up on step 10 of the tutorial since it was capping out at 15 FPS on max and 20 FPS on the lowest possible settings. My PC may not be a supercomputer but you would think that a machine capable of running most games effortlessly on close to max settings would be able to handle an idle game. Sheesh.

Fun for a few runs, but it becomes repetitive quickly; lacks novelty or progressive discovery. The visuals also don't change that much and looks like a gif that sizes up and down. Also, upgrades are unclear and unintuitive as to their effects. Lacks engaging information, flavor text, or interesting descriptions where you would expect content. It really is just a number-go-up game. It's also WAY heaver on GPU than other, more complex incremental games. Edit 06/24/2026: I started having questions come up about this game's fundamental concept and realism and really it bugged me. Nothing is to scale. The event horizon begins at a few mm in diameter. Strangely, pebbles, comets, meteors, planets, and stars are all tiny dots. The orbits begin far too close and far too slowly. The accretion disk flashes in and out of existence repeatedly. If you throw in matter too quickly, the accretion disk collapses, the black hole collapses, disappears, and the run ends. Except, I'm pretty sure that can't happen, right? A black hole can't collapse. If the accretion disk collapses, the black hole would eat it. Then it's just a larger black hole. Am I confused on this? Game values also don't scale realistically nor do they scale inline with smooth game progression. You can unlock larger objects which one-shot you for far less energy than the costs of upgrades to protect you. Each upgrade's effect is shown in +XX%. The descriptions are vague/imprecise and do not clearly state their direct nor indirect effects, and there is no visual feedback unless you estimate from flashing numbers. It will mislead you about an upgrade which actually kills you. Multiple effects affect the same variables, but they appear to all be linear, and their relationship to each other doesn't feel calibrated correctly. There's also no clarification if something is programmed as positively/negatively correlated, nor as additive/multiplicative. It also doesn't display all the factors affecting any single stat. A disappointing, frustrating, and baffling experience playing this game.

I don't know if a lot of these folks leaving reviews have actually played AI games, but this is NOT AN AI GAME. It's kind of weird to even assert that, nothing about the UI has the standard AI dev features, save for *maybe* the fact that the curvature upgrade menu layout is a little insane. Even then, you can see the vision, it's meant to provide clarity and distinction between upgrade paths so that it's clear what does what. This is a pretty good idle game, I can't speak to performance issues, I'm playing it windowed because it's an idle game, and if you're not playing idle games windowed you're probably not human, but I'm having a great time with this one. Don't normally leave reviews, but the chilling effect that bullying solo devs can cause is really scaring me. You can hate on devs all you want, but just remember, if solo devs are too scared to make games because they're worried about being accused of using AI, we're going to lose a HUGE part of what makes gaming so special these days. Undertale, Balatro, Ultrakill, Crab Champions, we're not getting anything else of that caliber if you guys scare solo devs into inaction.