Everfall: Idle Dungeon RPG

Idle RPGs live or die on one promise: leave the game running, come back later, and find your progress waiting for you. Everfall: Idle Dungeon RPG, a four-hero dungeon crawler built by a single developer under the handle GameDevJoey and released on Steam on 5 December 2025 for NZ$7.39, gets the "idle RPG" part right by most early accounts and then, according to a striking cluster of its own user reviews, fails the one promise that makes the genre work at all: it reportedly ate people's saves.

A competent loop, by the reviewers' own account

Strip away the bugs for a moment and the design underneath is sound, familiar-in-a-good-way idle RPG territory. You build a four-hero party -- Tank, Rogue, Mage, Healer -- each with multiple ability and build paths, and send them through automated combat against scaling dungeons. Loot runs Common through Legendary with "rumors of Mythic," and the endgame opens into two systems: Vault Dungeons (key-gated, loot-heavy boss runs) and Rune Trials (high-difficulty fights that actually reward build quality rather than just numbers going up). Three named difficulty variants -- Everfall, Stoneforge, Umbral Depths -- reshuffle enemy health and damage rather than just scaling a single slider, which is a small but real piece of design thought. Reviewers who caught the game in its first hours were, several of them, genuinely won over: "Game has been super fun already! I love managing my little dudes," reads one; "High potential for the next Idle Clans," reads another, name-checking one of the genre's stronger recent entries as the bar this was reaching for.

That's the shape of a review this library would ordinarily score in the 6s -- competent, familiar, a bit thin on originality, worth a look for genre fans. It is not the review this game earns.

What actually happened

Reading the negative sample -- 20 of the 30 total reviews at time of writing, all in English -- turns up a complaint that is unusually specific and unusually consistent for an idle game: saves corrupting. Not occasionally, and not for one unlucky player. "I played for 3 hours, closed the game, and went to sleep. When I woke up, the game hadn't saved my progress," reads one. "I have 20 hours played because it is an idle game and i started and left it on overnight. When i returned after work the following day, I closed the app and my save file was corrupted," reads another, with 1,217 minutes logged. "Save Files get corrupted everytime you close," reads a third, flatly. For a genre whose entire value proposition is unattended progress, this isn't a rough edge -- it's the core promise failing.

Layered on top of that: multiple reviewers report the game does not reliably run while backgrounded or minimized, which for an idle title is close to the same failure by another name. One reviewer's arc through their own review is the clearest evidence of how this played out in real time: an edited post that opens "Having a blast already, and getting that sweet Clickpocalypse2 style dopamine. Great job!" and then continues, in the same review, "Edit: Progress was deleted, doesn't run correctly... would not recommend."

The most damaging single data point, though, is what several independent reviewers say the developer told them directly. Multiple reviews, unprompted and describing the same event from different angles, report that GameDevJoey posted in the game's Discord on 8 December 2025 -- three days after the Steam launch -- that he was unable to fix the game's core issues and would not be continuing to support it. "Dev had a rocky start and has now decided to just abandon the game after a week," reads one. "That was December 8th, 3 days after the steam release," reads another, independently corroborating the date. One reviewer also describes being banned from the game's Steam discussion forum and having their posts deleted after raising these issues publicly -- a claim this review can't independently verify beyond noting it appears in the review text with a linked community guide as supporting evidence.

The store page's own pull-quotes are worth a second look

Everfall's Steam description leads with three review blurbs -- "Shockingly addicting" at 9/10 from "PC Gamer Forge," 4.5/5 from "Steam Deck Hub," and 9.8/10 from "GameRealm Weekly" -- presented in the same visual register real outlets use on major releases. None of those three names correspond to publications this review could verify exist, and at least one Steam reviewer flagged exactly this before the stability problems were even the main story: "upon further research the reviews are fake. Good odds there is undisclosed AI present as well." Whether that specific accusation about AI involvement in development is accurate is not something this review can confirm, but the attributed pull-quotes reading as invented is a fair, checkable observation, and it's the kind of thing worth knowing before you trust anything else on the page.

To the developer's credit

It would be unfair to write this off as pure abandonware cynicism. Several reviewers, including ones ultimately marking the game not recommended, specifically praise GameDevJoey as personable and responsive on Discord, and describe genuine attempts to fix reported bugs in the game's first days before the harder call to stop came down. And the response wasn't silence: public listings show a sequel, Everfall 2: Idle Dungeon RPG, released roughly three months later in March 2026 with a meaningfully better reception -- a pattern that reads less like a scam and more like a solo developer who shipped before the foundation was solid, said so plainly rather than going quiet, and tried again from scratch. That sequel sits outside this review's scope (a 2026 release belongs to a different year's coverage), but its existence and improved standing are worth knowing if you're weighing whether to take a chance on this developer at all.

Verdict

3.5 out of 10. The idle-RPG loop inside Everfall -- four-hero party building, vault and rune endgame, meaningfully different difficulty variants -- is real and, going by the reviews written in its first hours, genuinely fun. But a game in a save-dependent, leave-it-running genre that reviewers say corrupted saves on restart, struggled to run in the background, and had its own developer tell players three days after launch that he could not fix it, cannot be scored on its design alone. Buy this one, if at all, only with the clear-eyed expectation that you may lose everything you idle away -- and check whether the sequel has actually solved the problem before spending anywhere near this budget on the idle genre's most basic promise.