Feartress

Feartress entered Early Access on 28 June 2022 with a pitch this library's readers should find immediately appealing: gather resources, build structures, hire workers and armies, and push across multiple dimensions, all wrapped in an incremental RPG structure with meaningful run-to-run meta-progression. Reading its 44 available English reviews in date order — every one read in full for this piece, since the sample is small enough to do so — traces a clean arc: genuine early enthusiasm, a burst of developer support, and then a long silence that multiple independent reviewers, years apart, describe the same way.

A real idea, well liked at launch

"Easily one of the best Incrementals since cookie clicker," reads one launch-week review. "Very fun so far and runs well with no bugs found," reads another. The meta-progression structure — unlockable permanent shop upgrades that carry between runs — draws specific, repeated praise as giving the loop real depth beyond a single playthrough, and the art style is consistently called charming even by reviewers who otherwise can't recommend the game. One reviewer, having played an earlier browser version, describes it as "a great game to have as a semi idle game in the background while doing something else" — precisely the pitch this genre lives on.

The pacing complaint, and the deeper one

The most common specific criticism is speed: build and resource timers running to 10 to 20 minutes per action, with several early reviews noting no offline progression existed to compensate for that pace. "An idle game with extremely long timers and no offline mode," reads one 27-vote review. "Regrettable purchase." Another puts it more bluntly still: "So effing slow. So effing painful. This game is like watching paint dry." Thirteen of the 44 available reviews raise slowness specifically — the single most consistent complaint in the whole sample.

The more serious pattern only becomes visible by cross-referencing the reviews against the developer's own news feed. Feartress shipped sixteen news posts in total: a flurry through June and July 2022, several update-notes posts, then a substantial v0.4 release in March 2023 — and nothing since. That silence lines up precisely with what reviewers report independently across the following years. "8 months, and has not had any patches for 7 months now. Seems like abandonware at this point," reads a February 2023 review. "Dead game. Don't bother," reads one from January 2023. As recently as July 2026, a review states plainly: "Devs took the money and ran off." This library can't verify intent behind an unfunded project's silence, and that specific framing rests on a single low-vote review rather than a corroborated pattern — but the underlying, verifiable fact is not in dispute: the update history stops in March 2023, and no review in this sample from any later date reports evidence of continued development.

What's actually here

None of this erases what exists. Several reviewers logged well over 100 hours — one past 480 — and the achievement data shows a real, if front-loaded, engagement curve: 88.6% for the earliest milestone, dropping into the 30-40% range for mid-game unlocks. That's consistent with a genuinely playable, finished-enough-to-enjoy core loop that a real number of buyers got real value from, even as the promised future content never arrived.

5 out of 10. Feartress is a likeable idle RPG built around a genuinely good idea, undercut by pacing that several reviewers found actively punishing and, more seriously, by a development history that appears to have stopped in March 2023 with the game still labelled Early Access more than three years later. Judge it by what exists today, not by what its store page still implies is coming, and it's a fair, cheap curiosity rather than a safe bet.