i feel like cookie clicker's whole absurd horror it was based on is lost by taking the game seriously as a game.
Sure, your first time playing is a wild rollecoaster of chasing changes in the news ticker showing you an increasingly absurd world created by your baked good empire, with more and more absurd buildings that generate these cookies, resolving by the whole universe being transmuted into cookie matter. then the news ticker stops showing the state of the world past a certain threshold, then you ascend, and do it all over again.
You grow numb to it, the implication of a world behind the big cookie becomes an afterthought rather than the source of the humor. there is no humor anymore, you derive joy simply from Number Go Up.
Now you're chasing prestige chips rather than news changes, sure; but once you wrestle with the implications of ascension, it becomes more fun to abstract the game than to continue playing out your implied odyssey of turning all of the multiverse into cookie through endless samsara. The absurdity of the buildings becomes mundane, sure why not planet sized brains manifesting cookies by sheer force of will, why not Javascript consoles to metafictionally cheat cookies into reality, why not clones of yourself to repeat the cycle? none of these things exist to you, there is no longer a world behind the cookie. there is only number, and ways to make it go up.
Even the minigames which force you to wrestle with the worldbuilding (if it can be called that), once the novelty fades, become like the buildings nothing more than ways to make number go up. you're not thinking about the wizards or the stock market, you're thinking about stats. Even the grandmapocalypse, the original end game of the first rudimentay version of cookie clicker, the pinnacle of the absurd horror, is viewed as nothing more than an altered gamemode to play around simply to make number go up.
Cookie clicker's narrative "pitch" is the comedic horror of watching reality reform itself around something as arbitrary as the cookie, but the longer you play, the more it's just a game. the news ticker and the flavor text us still fun to read, but it stops being the drive behind the game at some point, you're not looking for what's next: you know what's next, bigger number.
