Guild Quest

You have just bought an island with a derelict Guildhall on it, and your job is to fill it with quests. You collect guildians, upgrade their guildhalls, write custom quest lines and send the little workers out to run them while you get on with your life. Hyper Hippo Games, the studio behind AdVenture Capitalist, released it free on Steam in January 2017, and it has sat in Early Access ever since.

The design is a lazy-empire builder. You pick quest types, adventure quests for safe and steady rewards or battle quests for higher danger and XP, and assign classes to match: Knights to shield the party from nasty orcs, Clerics to keep everyone healed. Collectible cards grant permanent boosts, star points can even change a guildian's look, and conquering an island opens the next, where you choose whether to bring your veterans along or leave them working the old isle.

What the loop feels like

You place some guildians on a quest line, close the game, and come back to loot. That's Guild Quest.

You min/max a region that was a pain to finish, and the numbers finally look right. That's Guild Quest.

You realise you have not actively played for an hour and everything is fine. That's Guild Quest; it was explicitly built as a second-screen game to run in the background while you do other things.

The idle side

The systems deliberately reward leaving it alone. Guildians work unattended, swap freely between islands, and the challenge curve is yours to build: stack safe adventure quests for slow and steady income, or gamble on battle lines for the XP your guildians need to level. There is no prestige loop and no active combat, just regions to optimise and islands to fill.

Where it stumbles

Honesty first: development stopped without the game ever leaving Early Access, and a final patch before abandonment left certain features disabled, so strict 100% completion and some achievements are impossible. It is also aggressively hands-off; if you want active play or tactical depth, there is none. Community sentiment is mixed, with the friendliest framing being an okay background distraction for free where everything is attainable without spending a dime.

Playing it today

Free on Steam for Windows and Mac, with in-app purchases the community confirms are entirely avoidable. Temper expectations accordingly: this is a hyper-casual background min-max toy, not a modern live idle with prestige loops and content updates.

The verdict

A pleasant little spreadsheet of an idle game that was abandoned before it could grow up. The community's kindest read says it best: it was never finished and never will be, yet it can feel finished, and anyone who requires a finished experience should pass. If a zero-maintenance background toy sounds right and an ending is not a requirement, it costs nothing to find out.