Idle Loot Quest

Idle Loot Quest is what happens when you take the loot RPG, the genre of four hundred identical swords and one perfect one, and hand the sword-swinging to the computer. TopCog's little grind machine casts you as the strategist while your hero does the actual heroic labour.

Your job is never to swing the sword. Your job is the spreadsheet behind it: what to equip, what to sell, what to sacrifice, and when to burn the whole character down for a stronger rebuild.

What the loop feels like

Your hero quests, fights something called a Break Dancing Merfolk, and comes home with a hat. That's Idle Loot Quest.

The loot keeps coming, gear pile on gear pile, and your real game is the triage: what to equip, what to sell, what to feed to the next upgrade. That's Idle Loot Quest.

Then the numbers plateau, you flip your build to a new class, prestige, and the wall you were stuck against becomes a speed bump. Also that's Idle Loot Quest.

A survivor with a new name

The game has outlived most of its original distribution. The Kongregate web version is gone without so much as an archive capture, the iOS release was delisted, and what remains is the Android build on Google Play, renamed Incremental Loot Quest, last seen at version 1.4.9.

So it is a historical entry as much as a recommendation: a compact 2015-era idle RPG that survived on one store under a new name. TopCog's bigger idle RPGs followed this one, and you can hear this game's design in all of them.

Phazer's series runs from early game to the deep imbuement endgame.

The verdict

If you want a compact loot-grinder that plays itself and asks only that you enjoy optimising a spreadsheet of increasingly absurd swords, this is the archetype. Android only now, and modest in scale, but the loop it perfected is everywhere once you know what to look for.