What kind of game this is
A monster stands on the left with a health bar. You click it until it dies, gold drops, and the gold hires a hero who damages the monster without you. Ten monsters clears a zone, every fifth zone is a boss with a timer, and the timer is what eventually stops you. Fifty-four heroes deep, the interesting question stops being how hard you click and becomes which of your damage multipliers is furthest behind.
Clicker Heroes is not the first idle game, but it is the one that fixed the template: hero levels costing seven percent more each time, upgrades that double one hero's output, a boss wall that ends a run, a prestige currency that makes the next run faster. Most clicker RPGs since are variations on it.
Ascension
The first reset is called Ascension, and you buy it as an upgrade from Amenhotep, the eighth hero, at level 150. That is a genuinely good piece of design: the game hides its prestige button inside a normal purchase, so the moment you understand what Amenhotep is for is the moment you understand the game.
Ascending takes away gold, hero levels and zone progress. It keeps Hero Souls, Rubies, Ancients, Outsiders, Mercenaries, Gilds, Auto Clickers, equipped Relics and Achievements. You earn one Hero Soul for every two thousand hero levels you bought before resetting, and each soul is a permanent ten percent damage bonus.
The bigger source is primal bosses. From zone 100 onward a boss can be primal and drop souls directly, with the formula scaling by roughly the 1.3 power of how far past zone 80 you got. The rate starts at twenty-five percent and rises toward certainty as you level the ancient Atman. This is why the standard advice is to push a bit further than feels comfortable rather than resetting the moment progress slows.
Hero Souls also summon Ancients, of which there are twenty-six. You are offered a random choice of four each time, which means your build is partly luck. Siyalatas for idle damage and Libertas for gold are the two everyone wants first, Morgulis exists purely to absorb souls you have nothing better to do with, and levelling the wrong ancient early is the most common way to waste a hundred hours.
Transcendence
The second reset unlocks after you beat Woodchip, the Rodent, the boss of zone 300. Transcending throws away the Ancients, the Hero Souls and the Gilds as well, and returns Ancient Souls and a global multiplier called Transcendent Power. That multiplier follows a fixed curve, 25 minus 23 times e to the power of negative 0.0003 times your Ancient Souls, so it approaches twenty-five percent and never reaches it. Diminishing returns are written into the maths rather than implied.
Ancient Souls buy Outsiders, nine permanent upgrades that survive every future transcension and mostly make Ancients cheaper or souls more plentiful. From here the game is a loop of transcend, rebuild, push further, transcend, and how much you enjoy that is how much you enjoy Clicker Heroes.
The money
This is the part most recommendations leave out. Rubies are a purchased currency, sold from 200 for $1.99 up to 14,000 for $99.99, and they are wired into the systems you meet in the late game rather than into cosmetics.
Auto Clickers cost rubies, starting at 1,000 for the first and rising by 500 each time, and they are the difference between an idle build and an active one. Mercenaries, which unlock around zone 139, run on eight hour quest timers you can skip for 400 rubies each. Gilds, which permanently multiply one hero's damage, can be moved around with rubies.
You can earn rubies free. Clickables appear at the screen edge with a good chance of dropping some, mercenary quests return them, clan raids are the reliable source, and the mobile version pays out for watching video ads. None of that is fast. The honest summary is that the game is free and complete without spending, and that its later hours are visibly built to make waiting annoying enough to sell you out of.
Is it still worth playing
Steam reviews are Very Positive, 55,691 positive out of 62,152 at the time of writing, which reflects a lot of goodwill earned in 2015 and 2016.
The update history is thinner than that suggests. Patch 1.0e11 landed in March 2018, Clans 2.0 in May 2020, and after that the work has been ports and infrastructure rather than content: a new engine to replace Flash from late 2023, a free Nintendo Switch release in October 2025, gamepad support in June 2026. Clicker Heroes 2 launched in July 2018 at $29.99, never left beta, and was discontinued in March 2024. So the game is maintained and still runs, but it has not grown in years, and people who bounce off it are usually reacting to a late game that stopped being expanded.
Controls and the phone
Click the monster, click LVL UP. Learn the level-up modifiers early, because you will use them constantly: shift buys ten, Z buys twenty-five, control buys a hundred, and Q buys the largest amount you can currently afford. The mobile apps are competent and the game suits a phone well, at the cost of the ad prompts.
Who made it, and where to play it
Clicker Heroes is by Playsaurus, first published in the browser in August 2014, with a free Steam release on 13 May 2015 and phone versions that August.
The official free browser build is at clickerheroes.com, and the Steam version is also free. Playsaurus publishes standing terms for embedding their games on other sites, which require a visible credit and link back, so a framed copy here is possible later. For now this page links out, because the game is a closed commercial product and its official version is the one that keeps your save.