Spirit Detective

Open the game and you see a hooded guy slumped on the floor of a messy apartment, cocktail in hand, a German shepherd asleep at his feet. Outside the glass door, a gray creature presses its face to the window to peer in, and the TV in the corner flickers with static nonstop. Your character is called Subject245717, and the whole job is to go down into the basement and clean out whatever is crawling up.

I went into my first run with nothing but a baton and no skills, and died at the 12% mark of the stage. The second attempt died at 37%, the third at 50%, the fourth at 62%. That whole session I never got past basement floor one, and every retry cost the same stamina.

A trip into the basement takes about a minute

Your character walks right and swings his weapon on his own, so your hands are mostly free the whole run. The only thing to watch is the four-segment charge bar at the bottom; as it fills, you tap the tactics button. The grenade the game gives you for free at the start costs three segments, blows up an area and scales with a percentage of your damage.

At the top is a progress bar running from 0% to 100%, with a red skull at the end marking the boss. Monsters come in waves, slow but numerous, and your HP doesn't regenerate as you go. Die and the stage stops on the spot; the game shows the percentage you reached, then lays out whatever loot dropped.

On one run I died with the reward slots completely empty, not a single drop, while the next run dropped three items in a row. To be fair, that's how the game keeps players hooked, but an empty-handed run still costs exactly as much stamina as a jackpot.

Three cards mid-run, and what you pick, you keep

When you gain enough XP mid-run, the screen pauses and offers three choices: +10 attack, +10 defense or +50 HP. The text right below says plainly that what you choose is kept permanently, not lost when the run ends, so this is where the game's real progression happens.

Every mid-run level-up also fully restores your HP, so picking HP stretches the current run, while picking attack makes later runs go faster. I picked attack for four runs straight and watched progress climb quite steadily, from 12% to 62%.

The messy apartment is where you spend the most time

Back in the apartment, the bottom bar has five tabs: shop, character, home, tactics and theater. Early on, three of them are locked, and the game tells you plainly which basement floor you need to clear to open each one rather than hiding it.

The character tab is where you gear up, with four melee weapon slots on the left and four gun slots on the right. The gun slots stay locked until you clear basement floor two, and the shop has to wait until floor three, so for your first few dozen minutes all you have is the baton.

Drops are ranked by color, gray at the bottom, then green, and every item comes with a seven-line table of extra stats full of question marks. Those lines only reveal themselves when the item reaches a higher rank, so most of the time you're looking at an almost empty table.

The tactics tab is a wheel of seven items: grenade, fire aura, nano syringe, holy grenade, electromagnetic shield, nitro barrel and acid flask. You're given only the grenade; the other six are behind locks, and the upgrade button wants 50 materials when I had 0.

Five stamina a run, and ten minutes to get one point back

Every trip down costs exactly 5 stamina, and the stamina panel says plainly that one point takes ten minutes. The default cap is 100, so a full tank is only enough for twenty runs, and as you saw above, twenty runs may not even get you through one floor.

Tap the plus sign next to the stamina bar and two refill options appear. The one on the right trades 80 diamonds for 25 stamina and only allows two trades a day, while I started the game with exactly 0 diamonds in my pocket.

The one on the left says Free with a little screen icon, also gives 25 stamina, and allows five uses a day. This is the main resource tap for the entire early game, and that tap runs on ads and nothing else.

The broken TV in the corner is the most expensive thing in the room

That static-filled TV is tappable, and it leads to a privilege panel divided into eleven star tiers. The panel states outright that watching any ad anywhere in the game counts toward this progress bar, no matter where you watch it.

The perk list at the top tier is a bit dizzying: +100% attack, +100% defense, +100% HP, +100 stamina cap, +60% XP and 45% off the daily shop. The game labels the whole bundle as permanent, meaning whatever tier you reach, you keep.

But the price matches the appeal. I got tier one after a single tap, while tier two wants ten more views, and behind tier two there are still nine more tiers waiting in line.

Each tier also comes with its own gift bag and a daily gift box, opened with the same little screen-icon button. Add it all up and the road to the top is over a hundred ad views, and how long one view lasts is right below.

The mod cuts out exactly those forty-five seconds

Before enabling the mod, I tapped the Free button once to see what it was like. The clip ran about forty-five seconds, and after it came a page promoting another game with an install button; I had to find the tiny X in the top-right corner to get out. Only then did the reward arrive: stamina jumped from 86 to 111 and the remaining uses dropped from five to four.

With the switch on in the MOD menu and the game reopened, I tapped the same button and the reward panel appeared before I could even take a screenshot. No clip, no install page; stamina jumped from 111 to 136 in about three seconds.

I used the remaining four, and it took about twenty seconds for all of them instead of nearly four minutes of staring. Stamina ended at 211 even though the cap is only 100, which means refills through this route are allowed to overflow the cap, and the surplus stays put.

The number of uses is unchanged, though. After the fifth one the button turns gray and stops responding; the mod skips the watching, it doesn't conjure up extra uses.

The tier-up button on the TV panel works the same way: one tap and you're at tier one, with the stamina cap visibly rising from 100 to 110 on the status bar. That tier's gift bag opens instantly too, and notably, the tap still counts toward the progress bar for the next tier.

To make sure that stamina was really usable and not just a pretty number on the status bar, I went and spent it. One basement run took the balance from 211 to 206 and the stage ran normally, exactly as when you refill by sitting through the whole clip.

What works and what gets in the way

The art is what I liked most. It's dark and a little grimy, in a Western comic style, and small details like the dog asleep at your feet or the shadow outside the window give the room real atmosphere instead of making it a token backdrop.

The combat is much thinner. Your character walks and hits on his own while you press a single button, so the first few runs are fun, and after that you're mostly watching. This is a game to open for a few minutes a day, not to grind for a whole evening.

One thing needs saying before you download: the game requires a connection. When I cut the connection and reopened it, it stopped right at the loading screen, said it couldn't fetch data and offered only a retry button. It couldn't even reach the lobby, let alone a run.

The settings list four languages: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, English and Japanese.

When I checked the Play Store listing, the game had just over ten thousand downloads and no star rating yet, meaning it's still quite new and doesn't have enough reviews to score. It's rated 12+ and free to download.

So who should give it a try?

If you like games you open for five minutes, send your character on a run, pick up a few items and put the phone down, this one fits. The art is unusual enough to stand out from the swarm of idle games out there, and the mid-run stat picks are enough to make you feel you're making decisions rather than just watching.

And if you've ever downloaded a game like this and quit halfway because every reward panel greeted you with a watch-ad button, the mod removes exactly that. You still have to play, and still have to wait for stamina once the day's five free refills are used up, but at least every reward no longer comes with forty-five seconds of sitting still.