Artesnaut: Fantasy Idle RPG

This game is a hidden gem. The battling is purely idle. You setup your party and give them equipment you earn but the battle is automated with no animation. I thought I would hate this, but I decided to give it a decent chance. What I find most enjoyable is the story. It is all text based, so if reading isn’t your thing maybe not the game for you. I thought that at first too, but the more I play the more I enjoy the story. I do find it enjoyable to tinker with equipment, different party member and the various job classes. I have only been playing about 10 days on and off, but it fits my life style. I pop on for a few minutes, set things up and let it do it’s thing while I go enjoy life, then check back in periodically. It feels rewarding to unlock the next part of the story after letting your party auto battle for a while. I have been kicking around the idea of spending a few bucks because the in app purchases don’t seem like they are game breaking or predatory. And all bonuses are permanently unlocked. Overall I am shocked at how much I am enjoying the game and I’d recommend it to anyone who likes a good story along with some very casual gameplay.

The game mechanics is surely fun, especially the freedom in job selection and equipment drop (although too much RNG in equipment combination). However, the English translator is what I would like to admire most! English is no native tongue to me, but this game’s English translation is the first time I get the beauty of literature in English. Either he/she is that talented, or he/she spent lots of efforts polishing it. In these days, in many games, dialogues and scripts are considered as long as there’s something, that’s good enough. This translator is quite the opposite, I bet he worked like writing a novel of his/her own. I really hope he/she can get extra rewards for the quality of the work and get widely recognized since this game’s English version is quite niche as far as I can see.

Mmh…I really wanted to give this game a 5. This game is basically a novel but every few pages there is a battle element that acts independent of you and just takes time. Pretty neat idea. The actual idle feature of sending your units on missions, equipping, and assigning them different classes is cool too (though the classes all get thrown on you very quickly and would probably have been better if done more incrementally somehow—or if you did things to unlock various professions). The main issue I have with the game is it’s incomplete. Its like reading a fantasy novel, putting many many hours in then realizing the last half of the book is blank…epic cliffhanger. Of course this wouldn’t be an issue if the content/story was updated regularly…but as you can see, the game has not been updated much in the past half year. The most recent update, as far as I can tell didn’t even add anything to the story (which stops at chapter 3 which seems to be halfway through). This is a bit unfortunate given I had just put some money into the game too… Anyways, I think the game/story is actually dead and won’t be completed given the long wait in story development. But who knows, maybe things will pick up?