Idle Tale by Ed Grace

Start your Idle quest with IdleTale!

I’m Shrubbie and I’m back! First of all, after months of enjoyment, I decided to stop playing Legend of Mushroom. The game has become extremely pay-2-win with too many tasks and features to upgrade on a daily basis. When a game becomes a chore, it usually doesn’t last long on my phone.

Since then, I have been searching for the holy grail on the Play Store, among a sea of boring duplicates of an okay city builder. I found my grail in IdleTale: a completely free, idle, incremental RPG! Yes, Completely free! No ads to ruin the experience. With the recent ugly trend of throwing ads in the user’s face, this game was off to a good start!

What is an Idle incremental game?

Let’s start with the easy term: “idle”. In gaming, idle means that you let the game play by itself. You’ll often get both an offline progression, earning some kind of currency when the app is close, and an online progression, completing tasks, upgrading the system…etc

It sounds like a game for the lazy gamer, right? At least, that was my first impression when I came across this mechanic. Well, quite the opposite! The difficulty and beauty in this type of games come down to how the idle mechanic is implemented within the incremental game genre.

The Idle mechanic is often used in incremental games. You earn a currency over time, online or offline, and invest it to further progress in the game. As the name suggest, the core of such game is to add small increments to some features (e.g. character stats, gear) to become stronger over time. The core strategy thus resolves around earning the currency (let’s call them coins) or improving earnings, and spending those coins on the various aspects of the game. In many incremental games, coins are earned by tapping the screen or simply waiting.

Though the basic mechanic appears simple and requires low involvement from the player, incremental games remain no less challenging. The real challenge lies in which strategies you’ll find to beat a specific level, to improve your earnings and to progress further. The game will often let you explore many paths. Finding the right one will determine success over failure. Imagine starting an RPG as a warrior. You’ll do very good in melee combat. Imagine now that you face a level full of archers, your progress will probably come to a halt until you successfully adapt your strategy. You could either increase your speed to charge at them and hope to overpower them, or become agile as an elf, arm yourself with a bow and arrow and shoot a storm of arrows at them. The strategy is up to you, but one might perform better than the other.

Because of their simple implementation, simple mechanic and familiar use of haptics, incremental games work great on mobile, a device you can easily pick and play, or leave alone for hours or days. However, not all incremental games will keep you entertained or coming back for more!

What sets Idle Tale apart!

The theme

I’ve tried many incrementals over the years covering many themes. Even the fantastic The Tower by Tech Tree Games! First, I shall say that all themes can be implemented as an incremental game, but not all themes will work best as incremental, especially when it comes to tapping/clicking the screen for earning coins. Idle Tale is an RPG theme where you repel hordes of enemies as you get stronger (kinda like Legend of Mushroom). Tapping the screen here makes sense and completely blends in with the theme as it mimics how you’d slash a sword into the body of your enemies. You get pumped up at the idea of defeating a monster and end up slashing even faster! On the other hand, tapping forever in a restaurant theme game quickly loses its charm.

The Art

I thought I would get put off by the pixel art. I have long abandoned old RPG games, though I might reopen Game Boy Color games on an emulator from time to time. That was until I tried Idle Tale! Though the game portrays pixel characters and landscapes, you can quickly see the effort put in details and exploring new maps and dungeons is such a delight! The animation features parallax animations with landscape layers moving at different speed creating the illusion of a foreground and background. Each map and each dungeon are carefully crafted with their own beauty, difficulty and set of challenges.

On top of that, the game features RetroWave electronic music that brings a wave of freshness to the whole pixelated retro design. I am hopefully that they will release the soundtrack on Spotify in the future and I am already ready to loop it forever as I navigate life.

The tech

I have played many games to quench my thirst for entertainment. More often that not, those games would destroy my phone and drain the battery in a matter of minutes! I was expected the same or even worse from IdleTale, being a game where you’d leave the phone on, killing monsters and earning your coins. I do not know how they had achieved this great feat, but the game has been running smoothly with minimal use of the battery! Other developers should learn from Ed!

Second, the game is available cross platform. You can find it on mobile and Steam, and it will also be playable in the browser in the future via Itch.io. Though cloud saving is not functional yet, it is possible to transfer saves manually across devices. Considering that the game was released in Early Access earlier this month (Sept. 2024), I am very hopeful that the dev will keep on improving and developing this game!

The community

Rare are games where the dev is both one of the players and gets involved closely with the gamers. Though the game is fairly new, Ed Grace has already built a solid Discord community where he interacts with the players. Bugs are reported, suggestions are highly encouraged and more often than not become implemented in future updates. It’s not just a game for the players, it’s a game by the players. On top of that, Ed Grace is approachable and will often come and help newer players, providing tricks and tips to progress in the game. You feel part of something bigger, away from the toxicity of war/city builder games.

The mechanic

What would be this introduction without discussing the mechanic! Idle Tale sticks to the genre: earn, upgrade, get better. However, the upgrades are smart and well immersed into the RPG theme! You’ve got your classic upgrades that help you earn more coins or more luxurious earnings (e.g. 10 cents a task vs. 100$ bill per task) and your upgrades that help you unlock new features or modify elements in the game.

Passed a certain point, upgrades will be hidden or locked behind quests that will have you explore the game and defeat specific enemies. You’ll inherently have to adapt strategies and find new ways to progress.

Last, the game feature a classic Prestige system (called Glory or Ascencion) where you’d face death and come back even stronger. Glory unlocks a whole new set of strategic decisions from when to ascend to what to unlock first and when with your well-earned Glory points.

The game just came out and is still in early development, but I’ve already invested hours and hours of grinding. I plan on sharing more and more content and I hope you’ll enjoy this gem as much as I do! See you next time!