Deskrawl: Idle ARPG came out on Steam on September 28 for $4.89 with its launch discount, and four days later almost 36,000 people had it open at the same moment. That is a lot of people for a game that only takes up a strip along the bottom of the desktop, where a small hero clears dungeons, picks up loot and walks back to town while its owner does something else. Steam rates it Mostly Positive, and the people who leave it running all day and the ones who stopped around level 25 tell rather different stories.
It’s Diablo shrunk to the height of a taskbar, grinding away while you answer emails.
Diablo in a strip
You pick one of four heroes (Warrior, Hunter, Sorceress or Monk), point them at a map and switch on the loop. From then on the fighting is automatic. Your part is checking in every so often to swap gear, sell what the hero dragged back, spend talent points and push on to harder areas. Defeated enemies can be captured as minions, bosses included, and they haul the loot cart and add buffs or abilities in a fight. There’s a town to grow, a blacksmith, gems and runes, and fishing, which one long-time owner says ends any shortage of gold.
Diablo 2 is the comparison people reach for most, and the people who like it most are the ones who wanted that loot chase without having to sit and play it. One fan with 28.6 hours, who works through the day, explained the appeal:
“It still gives me that old-school ARPG feeling of always chasing the next upgrade, just in a format that works really well in the background while I’m doing other things.”
The window can sit on a second monitor or be moved around, and it’s light on hardware. One owner runs it on a Steam Deck at work through Proton 10 and measured 14 MB of data over a nine-hour online session. Linux is the exception: on the desktop it shows a black screen instead of a see-through window, and the developers have said on Discord that they don’t support it.
The wall around level 25
The negative reviews from people with the most hours in, anywhere from 20 to 50, describe the same thing. Somewhere past level 20 the experience needed for each level shoots up, good items stop dropping, and bosses that were beaten before start winning again. Someone 40 hours in put it in one line:
“once you hit around 25 leveling slows down to a crawl and drops are absolutely nonexistent.”
Builds are the other complaint. Respeccing gets more expensive with every talent point spent, and someone with 35 hours on a Sorceress argues that each class really has one workable early build and one late one, a point InsertCoins also makes in its 6/10 review. The Hunter came out of launch week as the class people struggled with most, and First Day Games answered on October 1 with a patch that raised Hunter and Monk damage across the board (Steady Shot went from 170% to 250% of weapon damage).
The long-haul fans have their own advice. Brew the XP potion early, park the hero at fishing when gold runs low, and start a second character, since alts keep earning experience and gold while you’re away and can take your old gear. Smaller gripes keep coming up too: armour doesn’t change how the hero looks, the AI wastes big spells on the last weak enemy, and the window likes to open underneath the Windows taskbar.
Online, offline and the Steam Market
Every new character is either online or single-player, and it matters more than the menu lets on. Only online characters show up on the leaderboards and can trade, and at least two owners lost 9 and 16 hours to an offline character before they noticed. The studio’s first hotfix on launch day made online the default.
Trading runs through the Steam Community Market, so equipment, materials and minions sell for Steam Wallet money. On October 2 there were 91 different Deskrawl items listed, mostly Reins for mounts at one to eleven dollars, and a single item called The Grandmother at $131.75. Opinions split along the lines you’d expect. One owner happily bought a Rein to get through the slow early game, another wishes the rarest items went through a gold auction house rather than real money, and some English-speaking fans think a wave of the negative reviews came from people who bought it to farm the market and found it slower than they hoped. Launch week also brought cheaters on the leaderboards and connection errors when the servers were at their busiest. A September 30 patch fixed cheat detection that had been banning innocent players and shut pirated copies out of online mode.
Should you buy it now?
If you spend your day at a PC and like the idea of a Diablo-style loot hunt ticking along under your browser, this is about as cheap as that gets: $4.89 until October 12, then $6.99, with a $1.99 Supporter Pack for an extra storage page, a legendary wing and an armoured horse. Make the character online if you ever want to trade. If what you want is a deep build-crafting ARPG for the long run, the level 25 slowdown is the thing to watch, and the next few patches will show whether First Day Games eases it the way it already did for the Hunter. There’s no demo to try anymore, since the studio switched it off two days before launch.
