Between Adventures IDLE

Introduction

Between Adventures IDLE, developed by Loop Forge and published by Rogue Duck Interactive and Gamersky Games, entered Steam Early Access on 8 September 2026 at NZ$10.61. It sits squarely in the skill-based idle RPG lineage popularised by Melvor Idle, but makes a deliberate presentation choice that genre veterans will notice immediately: instead of text lists and menu screens, it renders progression through hand-crafted 2D pixel art, with real-time animated battles against enemies and bosses and a claimable loot-drop inventory replacing the usual spreadsheet-style combat log. Eleven skills span gathering, crafting and magical disciplines, tied together by a skill tree, a multi-tier equipment rarity system, and full offline progression. The store page makes a point of promising no microtransactions and no pay-to-win systems — an increasingly rare commitment in the genre that reviewers explicitly note and credit.

A strong first impression

The launch-week review sample captures real, specific enthusiasm rather than generic praise. One reviewer describes waiting out "6 hours for the release" after already sinking eight hours into the pre-launch demo, calling the game "very similar" to Melvor Idle in the best sense while crediting it with "its own feel," and singling out the combat screen's claimable loot-drop inventory as a standout detail. That reviewer's score — "9.8/10" — is an outlier even within the positive sample, but the underlying sentiment, that the core gather-craft-fight loop is immediately compelling to a genre fan, shows up more than once. Another positive reviewer, evidently still early in a long-planned progression chain, walks through a genuinely funny illustration of the genre's signature "everything requires something else first" dependency web: needing a better sword to fight tougher enemies, which needs copper, which needs a better pickaxe, which needs wood, which needs an axe, which needs a higher blacksmithing level, which needs an XP potion, which needs an alchemy license, which needs money — closing the loop back to the original monster that started the chain. Written as a complaint or a compliment depending on temperament, it's an accurate snapshot of exactly the kind of interlocking progression structure this genre's fans specifically look for.

Where the detailed reviews push back

The more substantial critical reviews in the sample are worth taking seriously precisely because they come from players who kept playing for two-plus days rather than bouncing off immediately, and because they converge on a specific, structural concern rather than scattered complaints. The most detailed negative review lays out the core issue plainly: the game offers melee, ranged and magic weapons, along with item resistances and other combat stats, "but it doesn't seem to matter which one you use" — the mechanical systems that would make those choices meaningful aren't yet built out, which the reviewer describes as creating "the illusion of depth without actually providing meaningful choices." That same review notes the enemy roster barely varies mechanically as difficulty rises — the same fight repeats with bigger numbers rather than new tactical demands — and concludes that the game currently reads like "a checklist of common RPG and idle-game mechanics" assembled without enough thought toward how those systems should interact with each other. A second detailed review, more explicitly torn between recommending and not, independently arrives at a related verdict: it credits the game with genuine technical polish and the right foundational pieces of a "RuneScape-like idler," but argues it "lacks any distinct identity or soul" next to Melvor Idle, a five-year-old genre benchmark it clearly draws from. The same review reports a concrete progression problem: gathering skills lagging badly behind processing skills, leaving higher-level processing abilities without enough raw material to actually use.

A separate, more specific frustration is worth flagging on its own, since it cuts at the genre's core promise rather than its depth: one reviewer reports needing to manually click to re-trigger auto-food and manually loot kills during combat, arguing that undercuts the basic expectation set by the game's own name. Whether that's a deliberate design choice around active engagement or an early Early Access rough edge isn't something this review can settle from outside actual play, but it's a reasonable thing for a prospective buyer of an "idle" game specifically to weigh. The same review sample also surfaces a list of smaller quality-of-life gaps — craftable gear that doesn't display its level requirements up front, a settings window that pauses the game but still seems to award experience while paused, and a fixed window size rather than the freely resizable interface more established idlers in the genre now offer as standard.

Early Access context and value

None of this reads as a project without potential — quite the opposite. Both of the detailed critical reviews explicitly frame their concerns in Early Access terms: real technical polish, a fair price for the current amount of content, and a genuine foundation, but not yet enough systemic depth or content volume to fully justify the asking price for players expecting more than a short session's worth of novelty. That's a meaningfully different critique than "broken" or "not fun" — it's closer to "correctly priced for what's here today, with real questions about whether the promised systems will get the interconnection they currently lack." At NZ$10.61 with no microtransactions, the financial risk of trying it is modest, and the existence of a pre-launch demo gives cautious buyers a genuine way to sample the loop before paying anything at all.

Verdict

Between Adventures IDLE arrives with an unusually appealing visual identity for its genre and a launch-week crowd that's clearly enjoying the core gather-craft-fight loop enough to log real hours already. But its own more detailed reviewers — the ones who play long enough to test whether the RPG systems actually reward different choices — describe a game whose weapon types, resistances and rarities don't yet do enough mechanical work to earn the "RPG" half of its genre label, sitting on top of an idle loop that at least one player found required more manual babysitting than the name promises. A middling score reflects a promising Early Access foundation that hasn't yet closed the gap between its checklist of systems and a design where those systems meaningfully interact.

Wanderer callout

The specific complaint here — stats and item variety that exist without a mechanical reason to choose between them — is exactly the trap Wanderer's own gear-tier work has had to actively design against, using a measured colour-and-effectiveness floor rather than adding rarity tiers for their own sake.