Deskrawl: 34,000 people are playing a Diablo wedged at the bottom of their screen

Thirty-four thousand six hundred and ninety-seven.

That is how many people are connected to Deskrawl as I write this sentence. For a five euro game, out three days, played in a strip along the bottom of your desktop while you do something else.

That number is worth stopping on, because it says something about what people actually want.

The premise

An idle ARPG. You pick a hero from four, a warrior, a hunter, a sorceress, a monk, and they go off and kill things on their own.

You, meanwhile, work. Or watch a video. Or eat crisps, as one player put it in a review I find perfectly honest: the idea that my warrior is destroying evil vermin while I browse the internet appeals to me.

And there are three systems around it.

Minions. You capture enemies, bosses included. They then haul your loot cart so the farming never stops, and they help in combat: some grant passive buffs, others fire off abilities.

The town. You stockpile resources to grow an outpost into a proper hub, unlocking NPCs and services that open new routes to power.

Mythic Realms. Timed trials and escalating difficulty tiers, where the deeper you go the better the rewards.

It is clean. It is well arranged. The old-fashioned desktop window dressing, with its title bar and close button, is a very good visual joke that is not only a joke, since it dictates the shape of the game.

The market, and why I am labouring the point

One thing is not discussed enough: you trade your equipment, materials and minions with other players on the Steam Market.

That is not an ergonomic detail. The Steam Market is backed by the Steam Wallet, so by real money. An idle farming game whose items are tradeable is an economy, and an economy has consequences: it attaches a value to your playtime, it creates an incentive to run several accounts, and it shapes the balancing.

I am not saying it is malicious. I am saying it is the single most structural thing about the game and it gets one line on the store page.

The wall

Now the part that explains why this game sits at seven positive reviews in ten rather than nine.

Players past thirty hours all tell the same story. Around level 25, progression stops dead. Levelling slows to a crawl, and items above blue rarity stop appearing.

One player with a level 34 and a level 22, who had poured most of their life skill tree into gold find and item find, describes that ceiling precisely. This is not somebody who played badly, this is somebody who optimised to get around the problem and hit it anyway.

The second complaint runs deeper: build freedom is an illusion. The sorceress reportedly has one viable early build, because of level-locked skills, and one viable late build, because of how the numbers land. Talents are overwhelmingly percentage increases, which gives you a lot of boxes to tick and few decisions to make.

For a game selling the word ARPG in its title, that is the complaint that stings. An ARPG is a game where you cobble together something improbable that ends up breaking the maths. Here, the maths has already decided.

And the technical side

Several players report spending more time looking at server connection errors than playing. That is the sort of problem that accompanies unexpected success, and thirty-four thousand concurrent players, for a studio this size, is very probably unexpected success.

It is fixable. I note it as a state of play, not a design flaw.

What stays with me is the gap between the two halves of the experience.

The first fifteen hours are excellent. The format is clever, capturing bosses is a genuine idea, the town gives you a long-term objective, and there is sincere pleasure in coming back in the evening to see what your character picked up while you were living your life.

And then the wall arrives, and behind the wall there is a table of percentages.

At five euros, the first fifteen hours already justify the price comfortably. But the game sells an ARPG, and an ARPG is judged on what happens after the ninety-minute mark, not before.

Got past level 25 without stalling? Come and explain how, there are people waiting for the answer on the InsertCoins Discord.