I've been watching a lot of let's play content on YouTube for incremental games (it's like an ASMR thing) and after watching a lot of these games it is clear that pacing a video game is a challenge. Sometimes the player finds a sneaky way to increase their progress that busts the game, other times they miss the correct path and get stuck in a painful grind. It is also very obvious when the game dev has targeted a play-time metric and forces the game into that metric. Incremental games really expose this dynamic since they are generally pure upgrade mechanic attached to some kind of dopamine generator (flashy lights, rhythmic sounds, etc.)
Oddly specific niche jumpscare. Which games? Cookie clicker and universal paperclips are the household names, but reactor idle based off of ic2 has been my favorite gameplay-wise. The 2D adjacency bonus mechanics scratch the same itch tactical games have but without the stakes of messing up strategy.