Idle Simple RPG

Idle Simple RPG is precisely as advertised: twelve playable characters, twelve talent skills, five-person teams, and combat that resolves entirely on its own once you've made your picks. It released in March 2023 from okyakusama, a developer who has since put out more than a dozen further games built on close variations of the same template — a fact that shapes how this specific entry needs to be judged, because very little about it is unique to it.

The loop, such as it is

The pitch is a team of five drawn from a roster of twelve, each carrying up to sixteen passive skills chosen from a pool of more than thirty, fighting automatically across three combat modes of rising difficulty. Characters level from combat experience rather than gold-fed grinding, gold instead goes toward gear and a rune system that — unusually for the genre — isn't tied to character level, so runes earned early stay useful after a reset. At level 100 a character can be reincarnated, adding a new passive skill slot (up to a cap of sixteen) and permanent stat and team-wide buffs, and the loop repeats. It's a small, legible set of systems, and reviewers who have logged serious time — one reporting roughly 100–200 hours still ahead of them, several others past 300 hours according to Steam's own playtime figures on their reviews — describe genuine structure to chase: which of the twelve characters to prioritise, which passive skills pair well, when to reincarnate versus push further before resetting.

Sixty-five Steam achievements back that up with a long grind curve. Global completion data shows the easiest sit around 70%, but the tail drops off sharply — the achievement for reaching deep reincarnation counts sits under 10% globally, alongside several late-game rune and equipment milestones in the same range. That's a shape typical of idle games built to be played for hundreds of hours by a small dedicated core, not finished in an afternoon.

The offline-progress problem

Here's the part that should give any prospective buyer pause: this is a game marketed under the "idle" label where multiple reviewers report there is no offline or away-from-keyboard progress at all. One English-language review states it plainly — "this game has to run all the time, there is no offline progress or rewards of any kind" — and a Traditional Chinese review echoes it independently, listing the absence of offline rewards as a specific complaint. A third, Russian-language review adds a stranger wrinkle: farming only happens while the game window is actively running, and doing so was reported to introduce input lag into other games running alongside it. None of that matches what "idle RPG" normally promises a buyer — the entire appeal of the genre for most players is setting something running and coming back later to find it's kept working without them. If that's what you're shopping for specifically, treat this as a gap that needs confirming for yourself before buying, not an assumption you can safely make from the genre label alone.

A thin, and mostly non-English, review base

Idle Simple RPG has only 76 Steam reviews total after more than three years on sale, split 52 positive to 24 negative — Steam rates that "Mixed." I read every negative review this game has, across every language available, because the pool is small enough that doing so is genuinely possible: 24 negative reviews total, only 6 of them in English. The wider corpus skews heavily toward Chinese — Simplified and Traditional Chinese together account for roughly two-thirds of all reviews — with English making up only about one in six. That matters for anyone reading this game's Steam page in English and taking its review score at face value: the loudest, most-voted English opinions ("The 'game play' itself isn't even good for an idle game," "way to simple for my taste," one blunt one-line dismissal with eight helpful votes) sit on the negative side, while much of the volume propping up the positive share is short, low-effort Chinese-language text — single words, emoji strings, or one-line grinding tips with zero replies. That's not proof of anything improper, but it does mean the headline "Mixed" score is being pulled in different directions by different audiences, and a buyer relying on English text alone is seeing a more negative slice of opinion than the aggregate score suggests.

The complaints that repeat across languages are consistent, though: a threadbare tutorial (one Simplified Chinese reviewer, otherwise positive, specifically calls out the lack of early guidance as the game's biggest weakness, unfavourably comparing it to better-onboarded idle games), art that several reviewers across English, Japanese and Korean text independently flag as AI-generated, and — in one Simplified Chinese review with over 100,000 minutes played — a report of an entire achievement not registering despite being earned. A Brazilian Portuguese review reports losing all saved progress after a power outage, which, combined with no mention anywhere of cloud saves, is worth flagging as a real risk rather than a one-off fluke.

One entry in a large, similar catalogue

The single biggest reason to be cautious about Idle Simple RPG's originality is the developer's own back catalogue. okyakusama has released more than a dozen games on Steam — SteamDB and third-party trackers put the figure at thirteen or more, most priced under five US dollars, most built around casual or idle mechanics. One negative review states this outright: "the developer of this game is putting out multiple games using the same assets and game play with slightly modified menus." That claim lines up with what Wanderer has already found reviewing a sibling title, Idle Build RPG, released five months after this one, which shares the same broad automated-combat, rune-and-reincarnation structure and drew an almost identical complaint about minimal onboarding. None of that makes Idle Simple RPG a bad game on its own terms — a developer finding a formula that works and iterating on it isn't automatically dishonest — but it does mean a buyer should weight "genuinely new experience" claims about this specific entry accordingly, and recognise that most of what's good and bad about it will likely also be true of the developer's other releases.

Who this is actually for

At roughly NZ$7 (about US$5), Idle Simple RPG is cheap enough that a disappointing purchase isn't a costly mistake, and for players who already know they enjoy okyakusama's specific brand of automated-combat idling, there's a real, if unglamorous, hundred-hours-plus structure here: twelve characters, a rune system worth optimising, and a reincarnation loop with a long achievement tail to chase. What it isn't is a safe recommendation for someone shopping the idle RPG genre broadly. The near-absence of a tutorial, the reports of no offline progress at all — the one feature the genre is built around — and a thin review base split unevenly by language all mean this is a game to go in already knowing you want, not one to discover cold.