AFK Journey

AFK Journey is the sequel to AFK Arena and keeps the core idea intact: you build a team of heroes and the battles resolve on their own. What changed is everything around it. Lilith Games dropped that gacha card RPG into an open world drawn like a storybook, with Esperia as the setting and Merlin, a Magister, as the character walking it and recruiting heroes from seven factions.

The fighting is decided before it starts: you place five heroes on a tile board and from there the game plays it out without you. Progress keeps accruing with the app closed, and gear and levels are shared across the whole roster, so trying a new formation doesn't mean grinding one up from scratch. Between fights, the map hands out puzzles.

The name undersells it. Beyond the campaign there are co-op bosses, a PvP arena, draft modes such as Honor Duel and guilds with battles of their own. Since 2025 there's Homestead, a build-and-decorate manor layer that gave the game a management side, and that ended up naming the Steam version outright.

There's no entry fee and no mandatory subscription: the download is free and the money comes in through the gacha. A single pull costs 300 diamonds, 2,700 for ten, with a pity system that guarantees a strong hero after a set number of empty pulls. The shop also pushes diamond packs behind two-hour countdown timers.

The regular spend is the monthly passes: the Classic Gazette runs about €5.99 and drips 12,000 diamonds across 30 days; the Premium Gazette about €17.99, with 70 epic invites and cosmetics. On top sits the season pass, Secret Travelogue, which includes an S-tier hero selector. Once those are done, the next rung up is whale territory.

The campaign can be finished without spending anything. Where the wallet shows up is the arena, Dream Realm and guild rankings: results there track fairly directly with how much you've put in.

It's live and actively supported. Content is organised into roughly four-month seasons, each with its own map region, story, heroes and systems: Crown of Ashes, the seventh, started on May 29, 2026 with support-creature summoning and Magic Charms. In between, numbered patches land every few weeks, announced on the official site.

It reached Steam on April 27, 2026, though the population there is small: the all-time concurrent peak sits around 2,000. Most people play on mobile, where it passed 18 million downloads. It suits anyone after collection and progress in short sessions; the complaint long-term players keep raising is the season-by-season power creep, which devalues earlier progress, and a PvP where paragon stats matter more than the formation.