Idle Exorcism Hero

What the language split actually tells you

Idle Exorcism Hero sits at "Mixed," 69% positive across all 100 of its Steam reviews — a number that looks unremarkable until you check who wrote them. Restricting the same reviews to Simplified Chinese returns 89 of the 100, at 72% positive ("Mostly Positive"). Restricting to English returns three reviews total, two of them negative. This is not a game with a genuinely mixed reception; it is a game almost entirely reviewed by, and presumably built for, a Chinese-speaking audience, with an English release that is functional but thin — both English-language negatives specifically call out translation quality ("English in this game is a very poor translation. I mean worse than Google Translate") and an item-equip interaction that isn't explained anywhere in the UI. Anyone outside that core audience should read the rest of this review with that gap in mind: the actual verdict below leans heavily on the 25-review Chinese-language negative sample, because that's where the substance is.

The loop, on its own terms

Mechanically this is a straightforward idle RPG. You control five characters and up to five pets, each with independently assignable skills (up to sixteen slots across a squad), fighting automatically through a sequence of stages in turn-based combat resolved by speed stat. Pets carry elemental attack types (fire, lightning, ice); equipment drops with a chance of bonus effects, and matching named equipment pieces grants set bonuses. There's a level cap that steadily rises, gating access to a "trial tower" and other higher-difficulty content. None of this is badly built — reviewers who kept playing describe a game that works as advertised, and the achievement data backs that up: across 19 tracked achievements, completion runs from 44.5% down to 16.2%, a gentle slope rather than the steep cliff typical of idle games whose late content almost nobody reaches. Whatever exists here, a meaningful share of the playerbase actually gets to see.

The problems described by the Chinese-language reviewers — who are, on average, considerably more invested than the English sample (median playtime among the negative Chinese reviews sampled here is roughly 32 hours, and 17 of 25 logged 20 hours or more before writing a complaint) — are about depth, not function. One especially detailed 695-hour review breaks down a specific balance problem: pet damage output dwarfs character damage by roughly 3-to-1, several formation-effect skills are described as functionally useless at their intended power level, and elemental damage types don't meaningfully differentiate strategy the way the equipment and skill systems imply they should. Others describe the equipment-refinement system as too randomised to reliably chase a specific stat, turning late-game optimisation into repeated, unsatisfying RNG rolls rather than a build players can plan toward. A level-100 gate on the trial tower drew pointed complaints about pacing — several reviewers describe being told to grind in open zones for an extended stretch before new structured content opens back up.

"Every new game is the same as the last one"

The most consistent single complaint in the Chinese-language sample isn't about any individual system — it's about the developer's release pattern. okyakusama, the solo studio behind this game, also made Idle Cyber Dungeon (October 2022) and Idle Banshee Alliance (January 2023): confirmed via Steam's own developer field, both credited to the same studio, released roughly nine months apart from each other and from this one. Reviewers who tried more than one describe them as close to interchangeable. "Every new game they release is basically identical to the last — a new name, a few new art assets, the same formula forever," reads one representative review; another calls this specific game "a reskinned idle game" outright; a third describes the pattern as abandoning each title the moment the next one ships, to "scoop up whatever wave is out there." None of that makes Idle Exorcism Hero broken or unplayable on its own — taken in isolation, as this review has to for a lane devoted to games first released in 2023, it's a competent enough idle RPG for a low asking price. But it's worth stating plainly for any reader who has already played the developer's earlier games: you have almost certainly played most of this one already.

What this developer gets right

It would be unfair to let the "reskin" complaint overshadow the one thing this game does unambiguously well: the business model. NZ$7.39, one time, full stop. No in-app purchases, no ads, no energy system, no gacha currency, no battle pass — the Steam store categories confirm there's nothing beyond the base purchase, which is a genuinely rare thing to be able to say about an idle RPG in 2023, a genre where predatory monetisation is closer to the norm than the exception. Reviewers who otherwise found the content thin didn't complain about being nickel-and- dimed, and that matters: whatever else is derivative about the design, nobody is being pressured to spend beyond the sticker price to see it.

One specific negative review, at 245 hours of recorded playtime, reports a corrupted save file that erased that entire investment — a serious complaint for an idle game specifically, where progress is the whole point of the time spent. It appears once in the sample gathered for this review rather than as a repeated pattern, so it's reported here as a single documented incident rather than evidence of a systemic save-reliability problem — but 245 hours lost to a save corruption is worth knowing about before committing similar time of your own.

Verdict

Idle Exorcism Hero is a functional, fairly-priced, honestly-monetised idle RPG that does what it sets out to do without ever doing much more than that — and its own most experienced players, in the language the game was actually built for, say they've played this exact game twice before under different names. At NZ$7.39 with no predatory monetisation, it's a low-risk pick for someone new to this developer's small catalogue who wants a cheap auto-battler to leave running in the background. It's a much easier game to skip if you've already met okyakusama's other idle games, or if you need the English version to be more than functional.