TIS - True Idle Simulator

Every idle game makes some version of the same promise: you don't have to do anything, and the game will still reward you. TIS - True Idle Simulator's entire premise is calling that bluff. Its own store description opens by mocking "all those idle simulators requiring you to click things or build autoclickers" before promising something purer — a simulator that "doesn't require you to click, spend money or do absolutely anything at all." Then it delivers on that, completely and without a wink of the usual idle-genre scaffolding.

The whole game, described accurately

Launch it and you get one screen: a leaderboard titled "top idlers," ranking Steam accounts by how long they've kept the program open, followed by a "closest idlers" list showing your own position relative to the players just above and below you. There's no currency, no upgrades, no numbers ticking upward beyond a timer, nothing to click. The screenshots on the store page show exactly this and nothing more — usernames, avatars, and a running clock. It even carries a genuine "PvP" and "Online PvP" categorisation on Steam, which is funny precisely because the only action available to either combatant is leaving a window open.

That total commitment is what makes the joke land for most of its audience. "A masterwork. A piece of art," reads one of the most-upvoted reviews, going on to pitch a fake DLC idea — a pop-up asking "Are you still idle?" — that plays along with the bit rather than undercutting it. Another calls it "the truest idle simulator I ever met. Easy to learn but hard to master," which is the kind of line that only works because the game really is that simple. A handful of reviews report absurd individual playtimes — one over 20,000 hours, another past 17,000 — which is a background process left running for literal years to chase leaderboard position, not evidence of active engagement. Treat those numbers as a measure of how long a window stayed open, not how good the game is; the same caution that applies to desktop pets and overlay idles applies here even more literally.

The complaints underneath the joke

Not every reviewer is charmed. A small cluster of negative reviews take the premise at face value and object on principle: "i think this game is fine but i have no idea why on earth it would cost 3 USD," reads one from January 2023, arguing it "should be free or a dollar at most." Another, from October 2022, calls it "boring" and claims some players cheat on the leaderboard, though no further detail or corroboration for that claim appears elsewhere in the sample. A more concrete technical report, from mid-2025, describes in-game tracked time running at roughly half of actual Steam playtime — a real bug if accurate, though it's a single account of it in the review sample rather than a pattern several reviewers independently confirm.

One 2025 negative also claims the "Back to the game 1000 times" achievement is "completely unobtainable." The global achievement data says otherwise: ACH_BACK_1000 sits at 10.6% of the tracked population, a real if difficult milestone rather than a broken one, though it's worth noting the developer's news feed shows an "Removed old achievements" update in June 2023 — meaning the achievement percentages measured today reflect players since that reset, not the full population back to 2022 launch. That's the standard caveat for any ex-Early-Access or achievement-revised game, applied here to a much stranger case than usual.

Why it works anyway

The achievement curve tells a more interesting story than the joke alone would suggest: 98.8% of players earn the first idle milestone, dropping gradually through the hour and day marks, down to 30.5% for a week and a genuinely committed 9.9% for the top-1%-of-all-time leaderboard tier. That's a real, gently-declining engagement curve for a "game" with no mechanical hook to keep people coming back except curiosity about their own rank — a decent showing for something this deliberately empty. The developer also didn't treat it as a one-off cash-in: updates followed through 2023, and a full sequel, True Idle Simulator 2, arrived in February 2025, suggesting the joke found enough of an audience to be worth continuing.

6.5 out of 10. TIS - True Idle Simulator is a genuinely funny, honestly-labelled parody that succeeds at the one thing it sets out to do, and the leaderboard gives that one thing just enough of a hook to be worth returning to. It isn't a game in any conventional sense, and a fair number of buyers will feel that a leaderboard and a timer aren't worth even a few dollars — that's a reasonable position, not a wrong one. But taken as the joke it's openly selling itself as, it lands.