Loot of Baal

My first impression of Loot of Baal was skepticism: another desktop idle widget dressed up in fantasy armor. Twenty hours of roster shuffling, rune slotting, and skill tree combing later, I'll admit the skepticism was only half-earned. This is a sidebar idle game in the tradition of Rusty's Retirement, sitting quietly at the edge of your monitor while your three-hireling crew grinds through procedurally generated demon zones. The strategic layer beneath that unassuming window is genuinely denser than the genre usually delivers. The core loop runs like this: recruit hirelings from five classes (Mage, Paladin, Ranger, Berserker, Necromancer), compose crews of three, then send them into randomized dungeons while you do something else entirely. Combat is fully automated, but that does not mean you can ignore the numbers. Gear decisions, skill selections, and party synergies determine whether your crew clears or wipes. The loot system has real teeth: thousands of randomized affixes mean no two drops are identical, and a crafting chain covering socketing, rune insertion, unsocketing, and synthesis gives you meaningful tools to push gear toward Immortal-tier status. With 72 active skills and 48 passives spread across the roster, there is a genuine build-optimization puzzle here, not just a number that goes up while you watch YouTube. Where things get complicated is the progression curve. Early and mid game move at a satisfying clip, with Paladin aura unlocks and Necromancer skeleton upgrades arriving at a pace that keeps the metagame interesting. Past the level-80 threshold, XP requirements spike hard, and community reports are consistent: the grind plateaus in a way that feels less like a challenge and more like filler. The item loot filter system, while powerful, carries its own friction. Misconfigure a rule and you can permanently discard legendary pieces or rare six-socket weapons with no recovery option. That is a significant quality-of-life gap for a game whose identity is supposed to be frictionless background automation. The Steam community is also sitting at a Mixed overall rating, with roughly 61-62 percent positive reviews across more than a thousand players, which tracks with the experience: genuinely good ideas, execution that still has rough edges. On the technical side, the game is light on resources during normal operation, and stability is solid. The gothic pixel art reads clearly at sidebar scale, and audio cues (distinct loot jingles, class-specific skill sounds) give you passive feedback even when the window is minimized. A sixth Assassin class was flagged for post-launch addition, and Gleamer Studio has a public roadmap with scheduled patches, which is a meaningful signal for a small indie title. The pay-to-win question appears answered cleanly: all crafting and progression is available through normal play, with no paywalled power. For strategy players who like their optimization loops running in the background, this delivers more decision points per session than Melvor Idle or Idle Champions. The inventory management taxes patience, and the endgame retention is unproven at the moment. Approach it as a mid-session brain exercise rather than a primary game and the value-to-footprint ratio holds up well. If you need a hard endgame ceiling and polished UI to stay engaged, wait for a patch cycle or two. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Playable.

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