Idle Industries
A solo-developed factory-and-idle hybrid that grafts a miniature Factorio-style belt economy onto a prestige loop, released in July 2023 with roughly five stated hours of content and an open-source codebase.
6 / 10
Browse by year
Games released in 2023
219 games released in 2023 and reviewed here, best first.
Browse the reviews
219 reviews
Idle Taoist Mage Warrior
A cheap, unabashedly Legend of Mir-flavoured idle RPG from solo Chinese developer okyakusama, built around a three-class autobattling party, an enormous rebirth ladder, and a near-total absence of real-money spending.
6 / 10
Layers of Fear (2023)
A ground-up Unreal Engine 5 remake bundling both original Layers of Fear games, their DLC and new connective content into one package — whose own returning fans keep saying the same thing, backed by a real, measurable gap: the 2016 original still holds Very Positive 88.4% on Steam against this remake's Mostly Positive 79.0%.
6 / 10
Meet Your Maker
A trap-dungeon builder-versus-raider game whose own fans and critics converge on the same diagnosis — a reward structure that pays only for kills, not fun, flooded the community with unbeatable "killbox" levels — and whose support appears to have wound down roughly a year ago after a real, multi-season run.
6 / 10
Nearly Dead - Live and Let Die
A cheap, small-scale Korean co-op roguelite about scavenging zombie-overrun regions by day and defending a hideout by night -- Mostly Positive from a modest audience, genuinely fun with friends according to most who tried it, but held back by real, repeated multiplayer bugs and no public matchmaking to find them with.
6 / 10
Old School
MDickie's 3D remake of his own School Days recycles the Wrestling Empire combat engine into a chaotic school-life sandbox -- genuinely funny for the built-in fanbase, but saddled with camera and control complaints that have gone unfixed since launch, and a recent trust problem over undisclosed AI-generated content.
6 / 10
One Military Camp
A charming, Evil Genius-styled boot camp management sim whose base-building and art direction win consistent praise, dogged from launch through three years of updates by the same complaint — reviewers keep calling it a "waiting simulator" with too little strategy underneath.
6 / 10
ONE PIECE ODYSSEY
A gorgeous, fan-service-heavy turn-based JRPG that repeatedly draws the same reaction from its own most devoted audience — "I really wanted to like this" — before describing combat so easy it can be won by mashing one button, and pacing padded with backtracking through the same small areas.
6 / 10
Samawa Idle
A NZ$7.39 idle tower-roguelite whose developer sold a $1.99 DLC for basic stat tracking, apologised and moved the information into the base game the same day the backlash hit — but whose most detailed, veteran-idle-genre critics argue the 2024 expansion buried the genre's core promise under RNG-gated progression and a zone-pushing "noob trap."
6 / 10
Smalland: Survive the Wilds
A tiny-scale survival-crafting game about insect-sized humans fending off giant bugs, frequently compared to Grounded — with a persistent, three-year-long complaint that even its official 1.0 release still plays like unfinished Early Access.
6 / 10
Stray Blade
A stamina-combat action RPG whose opening third earns real praise for weapon variety, environmental art and a genuinely rewarding weapon-mastery skill system, undercut by a back two-thirds that reviewers say recycles enemies and thins out content, corroborated by Steam's own data showing barely one in eight buyers ever finishes it.
6 / 10
Sun Haven
A farming sim with classes, magic and dragons, sold for twelve dollars with a hundred and seventy-four dollars of DLC behind it. Its recent reviews have collapsed to 74% — and most of them aren't about the farming.
6 / 10
Sunkenland
A Waterworld-flavoured survival crafting game still in Early Access, whose real fun core loop is undercut by genuine base-corrupting bugs and security concerns — and whose "abandoned by the developer" complaints, common in 2025 reviews, are directly contradicted by an active, multiple-updates-per-week patch history running right up to this review.
6 / 10
The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales
A genuinely unique premise — a disgraced writer who literally dives into books to steal fictional items — undercut by combat reviewers call unnecessary filler and dialogue choices that a striking number say don't meaningfully change anything.
6 / 10
The Lamplighters League
Harebrained Schemes' pulpy 1930s take on XCOM-style tactics landed Mostly Positive with players, and cost publisher Paradox Interactive a confirmed $22.8 million write-down within a week of release -- a commercial disaster that split the studio from its publisher, ended patch support, and left global achievement data showing only 8.8% of owners ever finish it.
6 / 10
The Last Case of Benedict Fox
A visually striking Lovecraftian metroidvania about diving into murder victims' dying memories, undercut at launch by clunky controls and poor optimisation the developer never fully resolved before formally announcing, in a farewell post nearly two years later, that support had ended for good.
6 / 10
Total War: PHARAOH
A Bronze Age Total War entry that launched to accusations of being an overpriced Troy reskin — then did something this library rarely gets to report: Creative Assembly publicly apologised, cut the price from $59.99 to $39.99, and issued partial refunds to every existing buyer.
6 / 10
Tower Walker: MMO Grind Simulator
A single-player idle fantasy RPG about climbing an endless tower with an auto-fighting hero, undercut for years by one specific, unresolved launch bug that still locks some players' computers up on startup — and now winding down as its developer moves on to a successor.
6 / 10
Trinity Fusion
A sci-fi roguelite built around a genuinely inventive parallel-universe fusion mechanic, praised for its art and animation, undercut by controls a large share of reviewers describe as unresponsive and floaty next to genre benchmark Dead Cells, plus real progression-blocking bugs that outlasted the patch meant to fix them.
6 / 10
Under The Waves
An emotionally resonant underwater narrative adventure about grief and isolation, sold to many buyers expecting a Subnautica-style survival game and undercut for keyboard-and-mouse players by controls the game itself warns you to avoid.
6 / 10
Vacuum Warrior - Idle Game
A free Steam idle game about vacuuming dust into oblivion that a large share of its own audience openly calls a copy of Leaf Blower Revolution — and, three-plus years into Early Access, still hasn't shipped the 1.0 its own roadmap once promised for this year.
6 / 10
Wargroove 2
Reviewed the same day as its predecessor, this sequel draws a genuinely different complaint than the original — rather than being measured against Advance Wars for tactical depth, Wargroove 2's dominant criticism is excessive, often unskippable dialogue and exposition, alongside a specific features trade several longtime fans see as a net loss.
6 / 10
Wedding Witch
A charming, well-liked Vampire Survivors-style roguelite whose marketing promises explicit content it doesn't deliver — and whose main menu has carried a completely non-functional "Extra" button since launch, still unrepaired three years and one bug-fix patch later.
6 / 10
Wizard with a Gun
A stylish co-op survival roguelite about wizards who shoot rather than cast, widely described at launch as feeling rushed and early-access-like — and, as of June 2024, permanently frozen in that state after developer Galvanic Games officially disbanded.
6 / 10