SideQuest Hunters

Little game with idle mechanics and roguelite structure that’s not fast or flashy, but it excels at one thing: rewarding long-term grinding. This game 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. Rather than constant clicking or micromanaging, gameplay revolves around sending your character on raids, clicking the next mission, and buying upgrades. That’s it. Each raid unfolds on a roguelite-style map. You choose your next event by picking between two nodes, and the entire map is visible, allowing for some route planning. Most nodes are combat encounters (marked with a skull), but you’ll also find shops, healing spots, and a boss waiting at the end. The ultimate goal is to complete all stages in a single raid—a feat that requires plenty of grinding, as each new stage ramps up the difficulty. Combat itself is entirely idle. Your character stands on one side, enemies on the other, and the fight plays out without your input. You face groups of four to five enemies per wave, and battles stretch across four or more waves. Once you've defeated enough foes, you’re given the option to press on. Unfortunately, there are no speed settings, which means sitting through earlier, easier fights can feel painfully slow once your character gets stronger. There’s also a pointless walking animation between each event that wastes your time. Leveling up happens during raids, and each time you gain a level, you’re offered three randomized perks to choose from. This can only be done on the map after an event. After selecting a perk, the next batch is shuffled again. The perks are your standard fare—boosts to attack, crit, speed, and so on—but occasionally, you’ll be offered a legendary, epic, or special perk. Since these powerful perks cost the same as common ones, there's no reason not to grab them when they appear. Enemies drop coins upon defeat, which can be spent at shop nodes on stat-boosting items. These items often come with trade-offs—gain a stat, lose another—but the real currency to chase is golden bars. You might score a few from regular enemies, but bosses always drop a generous amount. These bars are used back in the main menu to purchase permanent upgrades, like faster attacks, more health, or increased XP gain. Each upgrade doubles the cost of the next one, so you won’t get strong very fast. Another reason for this is how bars are handled. If you die in a battle, you only bring back half of the bars. However, if you escape from the raid, you get to keep everything. There’s also a fullscreen option and a few quality-of-life settings, including screen size and visibility adjustments. You’ll definitely want to expand the window for managing upgrades—the default size is tiny and hard to read. The game includes a codex feature too, where you can track all encountered enemies, bosses, and items, with new entries added automatically after first-time encounters.

Review Edit: I went away and came back to check on it. While it is great the developers fixed the in game issues I brought up in this specific review... there is still a giant lack of communication. Again, the discussion boards are silent. They responded once after I posted this to the threads in there, then have been ignoring them again. So it's not 'we were quiet during the final crunch' it is 'we are always quiet'. Not to mention I posted about the *months* of silence, not just the last bit. I won't be changing to a positive review. There is more than a few positive reviews now and others seem to be having a great time and I am glad about it, however I won't be back -------------------------------------------------- So I only have about 10 minutes on this game then I ended up asking for a refund. While the game COULD be good, I don't have much faith in it for how it is. Also, the game released today, so it could get better, I just have doubts. First of all, the game won't go onto a monitor that is using portrait instead of landscape which seems like a serious oversight for what's meant to be an 'in the background' game. Secondly, it makes everything else run slow. I had only discord and 1 tab open running youtube and just steam open and it visibly made youtube slower (only by a bit but enough I instantly noticed it) as well as making discord and steam take an extra second to run processes. While this would have been fine if it was a full game, this is an idle that I am meant to have on while doing other things so making other apps run slower is just not going to work. What's weirder is the slowness didn't happen in the demo but does happen in the full game, so take caution if it runs fine for you on the demo. And lastly... where are the devs? There is 2 announcements for the game, both from last year. The game released today and there has been silence. Along with that, they have never responded in the discussions to anything anybody has posted. That makes me very sus of the dev team supporting the game now or in the future. The art style is good, the concept is good, I liked the gameplay loop, but the execution just isn't there. It's only 10 dollars (aud), but I wouldn't spend that on the game.

This game doesn't know what it wants to be. The only roguelite element is that you repeat runs and they have a little bit of choice what route to take, but...not really. Maps just repeat after the last one, so there is very little variety in content. There is one item that completely trivializes the game and makes oyu basically immortal, and it's very easy to target from the shops since you will quickly reach a point where you have more currency for the shop than you know what to do with. On top of it, this currency also quickly becomes obsolete, because when you reach your preferred item loadout, you have no use for the shop anymore, which makes all the bonus currency upgrades you chose in that run completely useless. But the worst part is, this game has one of the most badly implemented balances between active gameplay and idle play that I have ever witnessed in any game. You can not really idle this game, because after each fight, you HAVE to choose a path option (even if there is only one path and you have no upgrades to do, you must actively choose that only option). But the fights themselves are also not long enough that you can really focus on doing anything else during that time, meaning you have to interact with this game at least every few minutes to keep progressing in any way, which gets tedious VERY quickly. At least, there should be a toggle to auto-choose the next path and ignore upgrades (if you got levels during a fight, you can invest them in upgrades between fights). Other than that the game is really not a bad concept, the art is fine too, but they could have done so much more with this.