Lootborne asks you to fight demons beside your work
Fate Rate has released Lootborne on Steam, an idle dark fantasy RPG built to run in a window beside your work, priced at EUR 1.99 with asynchronous PvP and a 424-item loot table.
Lootborne arrived on Steam on 21 September at EUR 1.99, and its own store description states the design premise in the first line: a challenging dark fantasy idle RPG that lives in the corner of your screen. The window is small enough to sit beside whatever else you have open, and an optional always-on-top setting keeps the fight visible while you work on something else.
It fights on its own, then hands you the decisions
A hero fights and loots without input for as long as stamina holds, rests, and goes again. You look over when you want to level up or change gear. The loot table is where the depth sits: 424 items across six rarities, from battered starter gear up to mythic artifacts, carrying Arcane, Flame, Frost, Holy and Shadow affinities that stack into synergies. Duplicates can be thrown into a forge and gambled upward. Stats can be respecced, so an early mistake is not a dead character, and 26 perks and 25 potions exist to tilt a fight that is going badly.
Seven sectors and an asynchronous ladder
The release ships with seven sectors, 35 enemy types, four player-versus-player bosses, 60 levels and an endless mode. The PvP is asynchronous, with no lobby and no queue, and it runs on global and friends leaderboards, so a build is tested against whatever other players have left behind rather than a live opponent. Steam lists 27 achievements, 13 languages, Steam Cloud saving and a single-player campaign alongside the online battles.
Fate Rate develops and publishes the game itself, which puts the pricing decision in the same hands as the design one: EUR 1.99, with a 15% launch discount taking it to EUR 1.69 for now. That is a deliberate statement about how much of your evening the game expects to hold.
Our opinion
The idle RPG has been converging on the same conclusion for a decade: the resource that actually runs out is the player's attention, and the games that respect it assume there is something else open on the desktop. Saying so in the store description, and sizing the window to fit that claim, is a clearer statement of intent than most releases manage. The open question is whether 424 items and six rarities produce decisions worth returning to or just a longer column of numbers that grows while you are not looking, and the forge is where that will be settled: an upgrade gamble that can swallow a duplicate is a real constraint, and a respec that exists at all turns the loot chase into something closer to a puzzle. At EUR 1.99 the experiment is cheap enough to run. What it cannot buy is the thing the best games in this genre have, which is a reason to look over that is better than curiosity.