AFK Journey preview – the RPG that plays itself

AFK Journey / Farlight Games

The AFK in AFK Journey stands for exactly what you think it does. More likely to be called ‘idle’ these days, it stands for ‘away from keyboard,’ i.e., a game that plays itself. AFK Journey doesn’t fit neatly into the idle game genre. The battles are indeed idle – you don’t need to click on an attack if you don’t want to – but everything else in the overworld is very involved. It's also a hybrid of a number of genres which is what makes it different from the other mobile games I’ve played.

AFK Journey is the sequel to the hugely popular AFK Arena, which is one of the more popular mobile games on the market. While it’s clearly designed with mobile in mind, the team has managed to make it fit well on PC with upgraded visuals. There are a number of upgrades over Arena. Journey features full voice acting, and there are plenty of cutscenes to show this off. The quality is surprisingly good for a mobile game, and it certainly elevates it as one of the more premium mobile experiences.

AFK Journey / Farlight Games

In the first area, you are given several crew members to fight while you are idle during battles, and you organize everything outside of battles. Unicorn Overlord has been a huge success this year, and AFK Journey has a similar battle system. You equip your party members with the weapons and armor you obtain and tell them how they should act in battle before you let go of the reins. One difference between the two systems is that characters don’t level up in battle, and you instead spend points to level up outside of battle, allowing you to level up a character who hasn’t even participated.

This brings us to the monetization. AFK Journey is a free-to-play gacha game, and the main way the game makes money is by selling envelopes that let you recruit characters. Characters range in rarity and strength, and you’ll need five characters to make up your party. This means that just one strong character won’t do, but technically you could grind any character high enough to take on the game’s challenges. While you can pick up characters in-game for free, you will get further faster if you spend your cash.

AFK Journey / Farlight Games

The main hurdle I think that AFK Journey has to overcome is its comparison to other gacha games, most notably the behemoths of the genre from HoYoverse. Both Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail look and play like $70 games – even on mobile – and yet it is possible to play them completely free. But while both are gacha games, I’m not sure they share the same market. AFK Journey is far more casual and I can see it appealing more to people who want something they can pick up and put down on the go.

AFK Journey definitely has a space in the market and I have no doubt it will be as, if not more, successful than its predecessor. If you liked AFK Arena, then Journey upgrades everything you liked about that game. It will also appeal to those looking for an RPG they can pick up and put down without investing too much brain power. What shocked me the most about AFK Journey was just how confident the team was in the game at my preview. The whole game was available to play at PAX East for those who had enough time. As I walked around the floor, I would see the same people sitting at the AFK booth hour after hour. There is certainly something special here for the right player.