Hero Tale

Introduction

Hero Tale sends a single adventurer into dungeons and open fields to fight, loot and level up almost entirely on its own, while the player's job is choosing gear, spending skill points and occasionally clicking to keep a fight moving. It began life as a mobile game on Google Play nearly three years before its PC debut, and Weird Johnny Studio — a team that grew from two people to eight over that stretch — brought it to Steam through a brief Early Access period starting 15 February 2024, exiting to a full 1.0 release just six weeks later on 28 March 2024. Read every one of its 151 English-language Steam reviews, and the game's Mixed score, sitting around 63% positive, comes into sharp focus: reviewers like what Hero Tale does with loot and builds, and dislike, quite specifically, two decisions the developers made around it.

A loot loop that earns its praise

Start with what works. The skill tree and equipment system draw consistent, specific credit across the positive sample — one detailed review recommends a build order (armour first, then power, then attack charge) with the kind of granularity that only comes from a genre fan who has actually mapped the system out. Community tag votes on the game's own store page back this up: Dungeon Crawler, Auto Battler, RPG and Loot all sit within a handful of votes of each other at the top of the list, well ahead of "Idler," which suggests the audience itself sees this primarily as a loot game with idle trappings rather than the reverse. The visual presentation earns similarly steady praise — colourful, cartoonish and warm rather than the grey progress-bar aesthetic much of the genre defaults to — and one long-time player who had previously logged well over a thousand hours on the mobile version specifically returned to buy the Steam release "to support the studio in future endeavours."

Steam's global achievement data adds a genuinely useful data point here too: 38.8% of tracked players have earned the achievement for finishing the game outright, which is an unusually high completion rate by this library's standards — well above the low-teens or single-digit figures typical of similarly scoped idle and roguelite titles. Whatever friction exists elsewhere, a meaningful share of buyers are seeing Hero Tale through to its ending.

An idle game that doesn't really let you leave

Here is the complaint that dominates the negative sample more than any other, and it goes to the heart of what the genre promises. Reviewers repeatedly report that leaving Hero Tale running unattended — closing the laptop lid, letting it sit overnight, walking away for a work day — earns close to nothing, in a game explicitly tagged and marketed as an idler. One reviewer with 8,873 minutes logged called it "probably the worst idle game I have ever played" specifically on those grounds; another, at 47,306 minutes, put it more bluntly: with no offline or idle progression, the only way to out-level an overtuned final boss is to leave the game running in the foreground for "a few hundred hours."

To the developers' credit, this wasn't ignored. A May 2024 update post titled "Testing offline rewards" acknowledged the feedback directly and said the team was actively testing solutions. What the review timestamps show, though, is that whatever came of that test hasn't resolved the complaint for the players posting about it: reviews dated well into 2025 — "idle with no offline progress" in March 2025, "no offline progression, no idle progression" in May 2025 — describe the exact same problem more than a year after the studio said it was working on it. That gap between an acknowledged issue and its resolution is worth knowing before buying, whatever the eventual fix turns out to be.

Fairies that cost more than the game

The second recurring complaint is squarely about money, and it's one this review can verify directly rather than take on faith. Hero Tale's base game sits at NZ$7.39. Its two paid "Fairy" DLC tiers — mobile-derived experience and gold boosts, ported over as purchasable add-ons — are priced at NZ$11.79 and NZ$13.25 respectively, and a Steam-exclusive soundtrack adds another NZ$8.99. Every single piece of paid content in this game's store listing costs more than the base game does. One reviewer summed it up bluntly: "a $50 DLC pack for a $5 game," and another flagged that the soundtrack alone was priced above the base price. The developers have already responded to this once — a Steam post from the first week of Early Access, titled "We hear you: dropping DLC prices," explained that the Fairy tiers had funded much of the mobile game's original development and promised to cut Tier 2 and Tier 3 pricing in response to backlash. Even after that cut, the DLC still costs more than the game it attaches to. Both DLC packs currently carry only a handful of Steam reviews each, which suggests few buyers are actually taking the developers up on them at current prices — but their mere presence, at these prices, is the second-most consistent complaint in the sample after offline progression.

Combat that rewards one kind of build

A smaller but detailed thread in the negative sample argues the game's difficulty curve narrows the viable playstyles more than a loot-driven RPG should. Multiple reviewers describe a late-game boss that heavily favours ranged, magic-based builds, with melee or archer hybrids struggling badly by comparison — one reviewer went as far as to call it "an obligation" to respec into a caster to have a real chance. Inventory management draws its own smaller cluster of complaints: items that inconsistently stack, forcing regular manual selling trips or risking rare drops getting lost when the bag fills up mid-fight. Neither issue is as central to the score as the two above, but both recur often enough across independent reviewers to read as real design friction rather than one-off frustration.

Final Verdict

Hero Tale is a likeable, inexpensive loot-and-skill-tree RPG wearing an idle game's clothing, and the trouble is almost entirely in that mismatch. Its progression systems draw real, specific praise, its completion rate is unusually healthy for the genre, and its low asking price genuinely covers a lot of rough edges — several of its own positive reviewers say exactly that. But an idle game that doesn't meaningfully progress while you're away is failing at the one thing its genre promises, and DLC individually priced above the base game is a hard thing to defend regardless of how sincerely the developers have explained or partly walked it back. Buy it for the loot loop at its very reasonable base price, skip the Fairies, and don't expect to leave it running overnight and find much waiting for you when you get back.