My Struggle to Keep up with Cookie Run Kingdom

I started playing Cookie Run Kingdom after seeing my roommate playing it. I thought it was pretty cute, and with it being a game I didn’t HAVE to play every day, I thought it would be a nice little game to pick up when I didn’t have anything else to do.

I played pretty consistently in the beginning. It was during the time I was finishing my last year of college, so I had a lot of ten minutes here or there between classes where I could jump in and do one or two in-game tasks.

My first few pulls were insanely lucky and I got Moon Rabbit Cookie, who was a featured cookie at the time, in my first 30 or so pulls. After that, I just went to work building up my little kingdom and leveling up.

Throughout my final year of college, I was on or off the game. I was pretty good about logging on every day, or at least every other day. After graduating and dealing with things like getting a new job and moving into a new apartment, I started to fall off and stopped playing.

Ever since then, my journey with my cookies has been a bit lacking.

My poor cookie game has been a bit dormant for a month or two because I just can’t get myself to open the game sometimes. When there’s not an event going on, I just lose all motivation to log on and do anything in the game.

With the recent update, I finally gave myself the push to come back. I have started to play it on the side while working on other tasks. Since this is the main reason I liked the game, I found that it was a lot better to get through the daily tasks when I could work on something else while my cookies beat up things.

So far, I have been doing pretty good at getting on to do one or two things on the side. I have missed a day or two, but it’s a lot more consistent than when I was missing a week or more at a time.

So, why do I struggle?

I feel like since this is a game that auto-plays a majority of the content, I don’t reach for it when I only have my phone available. I only reach Cookie Run when I am already working on the computer and can just click on the screen now and then.

Because none of what is being done in-game requires real-time actions on my part, I tend to forget about it. Having the game on my phone makes it so that I can remember to bring it out while I wait at a restaurant, but if I’m at home, I have a PC, Switch, Steamdeck, and PS4 to play games on so Cookie Run is, of course, not the first thing I think of.

The main problem that I have with staying up to day more consistently with Cookie Run Kingdom is that it is not designed to be played like a non-mobile gacha game. The game time gates everything you can do. If you are crafting, fighting in the arena, or doing guild battles, you will have to wait for something. The crafting will take longer and longer the more you upgrade and unlock more items. The arena fights that allow you to test out your cookie teams are limited to how many tickets you have, and once you run out, one ticket takes 30 minutes to replenish. Stuff like the guild battles or bounties are limited to three attempts per day. This means that you can only get so much out of the game each time you log on.

Why Do I Stay?

I keep the app on my phone because even though I can go months without opening it and it would save me time spent on my phone, I like having a game to fall back on that I can play without thinking. I would prefer if the game had a little more that I could do with it, I like making my kingdom look nice and leveling my cookies to get higher ranks in the arena, but that’s all I get out of the game.

Being able to do minimal work and still see improvements in my account is one of the main things that keep me going. I have built up my account to the point where I can get into Masters ranks in the arena and I am slowly clearing levels in dark mode to catch up to where I am in the normal mode.

This is not a game that should be a focus and take up a large amount of time in your day. I do spend more time on it when events are happening, but that leads to burnout because I spend too much time on a game trying to time the next cooldown period.

Of course, people who are willing to pay can play more, but I am determined to get everything I need by my work on my cookies and my kingdom. So, this is the perfect game to play casually, just don’t get too pulled in during events. They are over 40 days so there should be no rush to get as much as you want out of it.