Lonely Knight - Idle Roguelike RPG

Introduction

Lonely Knight - Idle Roguelike RPG is a free-to-play idle game from Enter the Game Studios, released on Steam on 18 March 2024. The pitch: play a solitary knight fighting through 7 fields, 3 event fields, 28 difficulty levels and an infinite dungeon, building a "deck" of skills and recruiting companions along the way, progressing whether you're actively playing or not. It's a recognisable formula for readers of this library — Clicker Heroes-style idle combat crossed with roguelike deck-building — and it arrived on Steam as a port of an existing mobile release, a lineage the reviews confirm repeatedly and the store page never really hides.

The genuine core loop

Set the controversy aside for a moment, because there is a real game underneath it that a meaningful slice of reviewers do like. "A cool arcade clicker with an interesting setting of rogue-like games," one wrote, "fans of the genre without the desire to work hard on farming and leveling up will definitely like it." The skill-deck system gives runs real variety according to multiple reviewers, and the game's own achievement data backs up a genuine, if steeply-tapering, population of invested players: a first-rebirth milestone sits at 55% completion, and the deepest infinite-dungeon achievements — clearing 30,000 and 50,000 depth — still hold at 4.5-4.6%, numbers that only make sense if real people are grinding this game seriously.

The monetisation

Here the picture turns considerably less flattering. Sixteen separate paid DLC packs are attached to this "free" game — currency bundles, a Starter Pack, a Grow Pack, and a battle-pass-style "Lonely Pass," each individually priced between roughly NZ$10 and NZ$19. That's an unusually fragmented structure even by the standards of mobile-derived idle games, which this library has covered plenty of. More substantively, multiple reviewers describe the gem-based pull system as functionally mandatory rather than a true optional purchase: one wrote that unlocking certain skills "REQUIRES you to pull using gems as a normal QUEST," rather than gems being a pure convenience currency layered on top of a fully-playable free path. Another reviewer, after 258 hours invested, reported a forced reboot wiped their entire save — a specific, serious complaint about the game's basic reliability that a free-to-play structure doesn't excuse.

The review-authenticity question

This is the part of the review that has to be handled carefully, and stated plainly rather than either amplified or ignored. Several of the highest-voted negative reviews in the sample — 150 and 102 votes respectively, both far above anything else in the negative column — allege that the developer employed a third-party website to pay people to write positive reviews for the game, with that website reportedly asking participants not to disclose the reviews were paid. Both reviews cite a specific named Steam Community group as their source for the claim. A third, lower-voted review calls the developer outright "Scam Devs buying reviews."

This review searched independently for corroborating reporting on that specific allegation and found none beyond the Steam reviews themselves — no games-press coverage, no independent confirmation. That doesn't mean the claim is false; it means it's unverified by this review, and it should be reported as exactly that: a serious, repeated, well-upvoted allegation from players, not a confirmed fact. What this review can confirm independently is a pattern worth flagging on its own merits: reading through the sample turned up a genuinely unusual number of short, generic, near-identically-phrased five-star reviews — variations on "cool game, addictive, nice graphics," almost all sitting at exactly zero votes — clustered together in a way that stands out from the more detailed, specific, higher-voted critical reviews around them. That pattern is consistent with what the accusing reviewers describe, though this review is not asserting it as proof of anything beyond what a reader can see for themselves in the public review list.

Verdict

Lonely Knight has a real idle-roguelike loop that a genuine slice of players enjoy, backed by achievement data showing real depth and real engagement. Against that sits an aggressive, sixteen-DLC monetisation structure, credible-sounding complaints about pulls being functionally required rather than optional, a save-corruption report, and a serious, repeated, well-upvoted allegation of paid fake reviews that this review could not confirm but also couldn't responsibly leave out. Try it free if the genre appeals to you, but go in sceptical of the review score you see on the store page, and keep a close eye on your wallet.