Refence

Posted July 28, 2025. Updated July 29, 2025. Played 2315 times for a total of 3644 hours.
description
Refence is a roguelike based idle defense game, where you defend the wall with your heroes.
Choose your heroes to fight against enemies.
Build your castle to unlock various upgrades.
Do researches to unlock useful functions.
Hire more heroes to defend your wall for more waves.
Craft powerful relics to help you defend against enemies.
steam
newest comments
played for over 6 hours and can confidently say... I feel like ive made no progression.
waves are unbearably long but Ive been enjoying this a lot for a demo
Why I saw it's Chinese, Even I don't speak Chinese
The game is perhaps not without criticism, but I am really enjoying the full steam version. This hits the spot for me, I'm a sucker for incremental tower defense games. I think the long length of runs and slower pace actually suits me. Thanks! Hoping for more updates as time goes on as well
Game has the bones to be something great, but with insane health scaling and the long LONG amount of time to complete runs, I don't feel its reached its full potential
I would write more on the game and its systems but there isn't much to say, the rest of the game is alright and I have no problems with its other progression systems (though certain heroes are so bad its insane they need to rebalanced asap)
As a demo it doesn't give me full confidence that the full game would be worth my money :(
top comments
pretty alright game, but its quite slow and gets boring pretty quick. It is just a demo, and the full game might be better, but this doesnt make me want to buy it.
good game. maybe have a speed up button?
@ENDAHBLAZE the game does actually have a speed up option, but it's locked behind a couple of research upgrades in the library.
I will admit that I did not remember the game being this slow at the start.
All in all, it's a nice game, not really my cup of tea, but I could understand others enjoying it. For me, I find there's a mismatch between how slow the game is and how active you have to be (even when your heroes are levelled up enough to handle waves without your input). i.e. With how few resources you get per wave, it implies it's more of a second-monitor game. But then if you don't look at it every couple of minutes, you won't progress to the next wave.
I personally would get a lot more invested if speed-up (at least x2 or x4) and auto-choosing rewards/hero levels wasn't locked behind hundreds of waves of resources. Keep the filtering in research, sure, but at least let us pick at random from the start so we can actually play idle-y and not have to pay attention to it every minute or two. The use of multiple currencies and a gacha in this sort of game feels... wrong. I can't dock you for it, but with those mechanics, plus gating the idle-ness in an idle-focussed game behind a few hours of progress... it just veers towards scummy behaviour, especially if the full game has in-game purchases.
As things stand, it entertained me for a couple of hours and I unlocked level 3, but I'm not about to sit here for another hour to get to level 4 and (maybe?) get enough paper to unlock relics.
One of the few game demos where I actually ended up thinking it was worth the money. Bought it back in March or so.
While I got my money's worth, the gameplay did end up growing a bit long in the tooth. The requirements for heroes' later tiers (from duplicate copies) got rather silly.
Contrary to my expectations the game didn't end up adding more heroes after release. Pretty sure nothing ever hinted at this being a possibility, but it seemed like a logical addition to the game to me.