Scapewatch: a RuneScape that keeps playing after you close the tab

Thirty skills. Three combat styles. Clans, raids, hiscores, pets, capes.

You have already guessed which game Scapewatch descends from, and the studio does nothing to hide it. The skills are called Fish, Mine, Forage, Cook, Smith, Craft. You work towards a maximum total level. The game's biggest rewards are skill capes.

This is a RuneScape. Openly, recognisably, claimed right down to the vocabulary.

Except there is one difference, and it is enormous.

Your character works without you

You put a task in the queue, you close the tab, you come back richer.

The character keeps going while you are offline: gathering resources, fighting enemies, levelling skills, filling the bank, pushing towards the next milestone.

Take a second to measure what that removes.

RuneScape is a game whose subject is time spent. You do not remember a boss, you remember three evenings chopping trees with music on, and level 99 means something because you were there. Scapewatch keeps that game's entire architecture and takes away its only fuel: being present.

Is that sacrilege? No. It is a different contract, and you should read it before signing.

What the contract gives back

What you gain is the ability to play this sort of game when you have a life.

I am thirty-six. Fifteen years ago I would have found this game obscene. Today I completely understand the appeal of a system where I pick a progression strategy in the evening, leave it running, and come back the next day to make the next decision. It shifts the pleasure from the gesture to the plan, and the plan is the part that has interested me for a long time.

And there is a real plan to make, because the skill list is structured.

Combat is split into ten skills across three styles, melee, ranged and magic. Gathering has seven, one of which is called Plunder and another Bard, which suggests you are not only harvesting rocks. Processing has seven too. Then there are field skills, including Luck and Alms, and two skills dedicated to raids, Delve and Fortify.

Having skills reserved for raids is smart: it means group content has its own progression, and you cannot get there purely by farming fish.

The strategic part

The studio makes much of the control: you choose where to travel, which skills to train, which enemies to fight, with what it describes as a considerable amount of leeway.

In practice, the decision loop looks like this. You look at your bank, you spot the bottleneck, you pick the queue that clears it, you leave. Then you come back and find the bottleneck has moved.

It is pleasant. It is also, let us be honest, a spreadsheet game with medieval dressing, and the quality of the experience depends entirely on whether you like spreadsheets. I do, shamefully.

The real reservations

The presentation is thin. The world is described as hand-crafted and there is care in the zones, but you are looking at panels and lists. There is no moment of contemplation, and for a game asking you to come back daily for months, that is a gap.

The social side is a bet. Clans, raids, hiscores: none of it is worth anything unless the population turns up. An idle MMO without players is not an MMO, it is a spreadsheet. The game launches today and that question will not be settled this week.

And the monetisation risk exists. An offline progression game is the easiest structure in the world to charge for, since all you have to sell is time. The game does not seem to me to give in to that today, but that is the point to revisit in three months.

My best moment is not in the game, it is in my day. I started a fishing queue one morning, forgot about it, and reopening the tab that evening I found a full bank and a decision to make. I grinned like somebody receiving a parcel they had forgotten ordering.

Then I realised I had packed the parcel myself, and that I had simply left the room during my own shift.

Thirty skills and zero compulsory hours: sacrilege or liberation? The debate is open on the InsertCoins Discord.