SideQuest Hunters

Introduction

SideQuest Hunters has a genuinely specific pitch: an idle RPG roguelite that lives in a small window tucked into a corner of the desktop, fighting automated battles against a growing bestiary while the player does something else entirely. It isn't idle in the sense of huge numbers and prestige loops — it's idle in the more literal sense of not asking to be the thing in focus. Developed and self-published by Paparajote Games, credited on the store page to just two people — CanoCoder and MorenoGameDev — it released 16 April 2025 as a full launch, not an Early Access build, and has found a small but genuinely enthusiastic audience among players looking for exactly that kind of low-demand companion game. The community's own tag votes back the pitch precisely: RPG, Roguelite, Idler, Auto Battler and Incremental all sit within a few dozen votes of each other at the top of the list, which is a rare case of a game's marketing and its audience actually agreeing on what it is.

A small window that a real audience specifically wanted

The praise in this game's small review sample is consistent and specific. One reviewer describes it as a game that "takes cues from the idle genre, but with a twist — it runs quietly in a tiny window tucked away in the corner of your desktop, demanding almost no attention," and several others echo that almost word for word: "simple but fun premise... runs off to the side with only occasional interaction," "hangs out and runs," "the perfect little idler I've been looking for." These aren't drive-by impressions — playtimes on the positive side run well past what a curious buyer would log testing something out: 93.7 hours, 76.8 hours, and one review at 188 hours flatly stating "not much to it but it's ok," which reads less like faint praise and more like a player who found exactly the background companion they wanted and kept it running anyway. The pixel art, credited by name to artist Rafael Matos, draws its own specific praise for its charm and its retro feel rather than being mentioned only in passing.

An item combo that breaks its own challenge

Set against that is a problem specific enough to be checkable rather than a matter of taste. A negative review describes finding a combination — the Vampire Dagger paired with what the reviewer calls the Certerious Potion — that made a run "straight up couldn't die," and spent roughly 18 hours of their playtime simply letting the build run to see how far an invincible character could climb before giving up around 200,000 gold. That isn't an isolated complaint: a separate positive review, written to praise the game overall, independently flags the same shape of problem — "a few items that are easy to get make you so powerful that you are unkillable... no matter how little damage you do you just have to wait to beat all enemies and bosses." Two reviewers, writing from opposite verdicts, landing on the same specific mechanical failure is a stronger signal than either report alone. For a roguelite, where the whole appeal is supposed to be run-to-run tension, a single early item combination that removes death from the equation is a real structural problem, not a balance nitpick.

The content itself draws a related complaint. One 56-hour reviewer writes that "this game doesn't know what it wants to be" as a roguelite specifically because "maps just repeat after the last one, so there is very little variety in content," and route choice within a run has little practical effect. Set beside the achievement data, that tracks: story-mode boss kills decline in a reasonably smooth curve from 83.6% for the first boss down to 41.7% by the tenth, which suggests most players who commit do get well into the content — but the two full-completion achievements, for collecting every item and every upgrade, sit at just 7.9% and 7.0%. Plenty of players reach the later bosses; comparatively few find a reason to keep going once they have.

A year of silence, and a patch that finally answers it

SideQuest Hunters shipped one substantial update shortly after launch — 18 April 2025's Update 1.1.0 added Steam achievements, fixed an ultrawide and vertical-monitor aspect ratio bug, and corrected a stat-scaling issue at high forge levels — and then the developer's public news feed goes quiet for well over a year. One June 2025 review, at 7.8 hours, calls the game "busted" and specifically complains it "hasn't received an update in 2 months," and an earlier April 2025 review edits itself to note that "while it is great the developers fixed the in-game issues I brought up... there is still a giant lack of communication," with the discussion boards left silent. For most of the fifteen months that followed, that was a fair and current complaint about a game whose central exploit remained unaddressed.

That changed on 2 July 2026, when Update 1.2.0 shipped an Auto Mode that "enable[s] automatic decision-making, allowing the game to choose actions for you," alongside a 2x game-speed option and general performance fixes. It's worth noting precisely what that answers: a May 2025 review had asked for almost exactly this, wishing for "a way to leave it completely idle (not just checking every 5 minutes, which is the worst)... if you don't do anything for 5 minutes, it automatically proceeds or chooses a random upgrade." Auto Mode is a close match for that specific request, more than a year after it was made. It's a genuinely good sign that the small team behind this game is still actively developing it and listening to what its players actually asked for — but it doesn't retroactively fix the fifteen months during which new buyers had no evidence that was true, and the invincibility combo doesn't appear to be addressed by the patch notes available at the time of writing.

Value and monetisation

There's nothing to complain about here. SideQuest Hunters costs NZ$7.39 with no discount currently running, has no downloadable content, and carries no in-app purchases, energy systems or premium currency of any kind — a straightforward one-time purchase in a genre where that's increasingly the exception. For players who find the corner-of-screen format appealing, the price-to-playtime ratio reported by its most engaged reviewers is genuinely strong, even accounting for the content repetition complaints above.

Final Verdict

SideQuest Hunters gets the hardest part of its pitch right: it genuinely does run quietly in the corner of the screen and reward a player for checking in occasionally rather than demanding constant attention, and the small audience that specifically wanted that has responded with real, sustained playtime. What holds it back is that its systems don't fully support the roguelite label it wears — a single item combination reported independently by multiple reviewers removes death from the equation entirely, maps repeat faster than a roguelite's replay value depends on, and the developer went more than a year between meaningful updates at a point when the game's most-cited flaw was still live. The July 2026 patch is a genuinely encouraging sign that development hasn't stopped, and it answers a real community request directly, but it's recent enough that it hasn't yet had time to change the shape of the review sample. At its price, with zero monetisation pressure, this is a reasonable pickup for anyone who specifically wants a background idle companion and can shrug off a broken build or two — just don't expect the roguelite tension the label promises.