New free-to-play MMORPG launches on Steam with promising reviews, but with a major caveat
The "Cultivation" (Xiuxian) genre is extremely grindy, but Legend of Mortal Cultivation (凡人修仙传奇) has just debuted on Steam as basically the "antithesis" to high-stress RPGs. Launched in its final form on January 30, 2026, the game is a hybrid of an idle clicker and a massive multiplayer experience. It doesn't really deal with the complex action combat found in peers like Eldegarde and instead focuses on the passive growth of a mortal protagonist who stumbles upon a god-tier artifact known as the Haotian Mirror.
Your character constantly cultivates spiritual power in the background. Upgrading the Haotian Mirror directly controls the quality of loot you receive from bosses and stage encounters. It’s a numbers-focused system designed for "second-monitor" play, so you can progress through the game while busy on other tasks.
Machine translations of early feedback from the first 124 reviews paint a picture of a game that does understand its niche, but it comes with a major caveat for international players: Legend of Mortal Cultivation is not available in English. Currently, the interface and all narrative content are provided only in Chinese, meaning those without a firm grasp of the language can't really navigate the menus or understand the plot. Some players are trying to rely on machine-translation tools like XUnity.AutoTranslator or screen-capture apps like Google Lens to navigate the menus in real-time. These players often use mod frameworks like BepInEx to inject English text overlays directly into the game's Unity engine.
Otherwise, the game is a lightweight powerhouse. It requires only 4 GB of RAM and fits into a small footprint, so you can run it easily on older hardware. For Steam Deck users, the news is a bit more complicated. While the game is playable, it is currently "Unverified". The UI is very mouse-dependent, meaning you'll spend most of your time on the trackpads, and the text is tiny and difficult to read on the handheld's 7-inch screen.
Read more about the free-to-play RPG here.
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