Near the top of our Player Agency axis and with nothing to push against — one of the freest games on our board to walk away from, and the one with the least reason to stay.

Tales RPG is a text adventure with an AI narrator, playable in the browser, on iOS since 13 March 2026 and on Google Play. It ships under two different publisher names for the same bundle — RAIVIS STUDENS on the App Store, DWStudio on Google Play — which is worth knowing if you are checking it is the app you meant to install. You either pick a story — from the developer’s own set or the community’s — or write your own premise, then build a character with an appearance, a personality and a background and play it out in prose. Skills and traits accumulate from what you actually do, there is an inventory and equipment underneath, and three story modes ship in the app: “RPG”, “Story” and “Dungeons and Dragons (D&D)”.

It is the plainest kind of product in this directory, and it scores in a way almost nothing else does: a field-ceiling axis on a below-median composite.

What It Scores

Tales RPG scores 2.8 out of 5, thirteenth of the twenty-five platforms on our benchmark.

The score to look at is Player Agency — 4, the second-highest we have ever awarded on that axis — shared with AI Dungeon and Tabled, and beaten only by NOPOTIONS. You do not get puppeted: the narrator stays out of your character’s mouth. And railroading is not really a property of the engine here at all — it is a property of whichever story you loaded, because the app makes directedness a setting you choose. The store listing puts it exactly right: you “decide how directed each chapter should be by adding detailed instructions — or let the AI take full creative control.” Load an open premise and there is nothing to be railroaded by.

That freedom is what the rest of the score is paying for. Determinism & Fairness — 2: there is virtually no pushback, so there is no real sense of danger or risk, and the stakes never rise. NPC Fidelity — 2.5 — the first half-point we have awarded on this axis — is where the two halves of the axis split. Characters are not agreeable mirrors in a single scene, but they flatten out over a long session, and you get no pushback on your relationships at all. What the game is missing is personality enforcement at the engine level rather than better prose.

Mechanical Depth — 3 is above the field, not below it: twenty-four of the thirty-seven products we have scored sit at 2 or lower. Tales RPG is a simple experience but not a bare one — it is better and more complex than the same story run on your own favourite model, and it is not much more ambitious than that either.

Memory & Continuity — 3 and Longevity — 3 are the same finding twice. It is not on par with the apex of the category, but it is not a model doing everything unaided either. It plays nicely, it holds the core of a story, and it is fun. What handicaps it is the absence of pushback, the flattening of the NPC voices, and the fact that it breaks on longer campaigns.

Signature Design — 2. The skills and levelling are the best-made thing in it. Nothing else here is something we have not already seen elsewhere.

The Shape This Score Makes

Set Tales RPG’s seven axes beside AI Dungeon’s and four of them are identical, a fifth is within half a point, and the two that differ do so by a single point each. It is the same profile — maximum agency, minimum consequence — with one more point of mechanical depth, one more of longevity, and half a point less of NPC fidelity. AI Dungeon has been shipping since 2019 and Tales RPG since March 2026, and they arrive at the same trade.

That is worth naming, because our board keeps suggesting freedom and fairness travel together and this entry is more evidence that they do not. What earns an outcome is a system that adjudicates it, a designer who wrote it down, or a character who refuses you. Tales RPG has none of those, so it hands you the freedom and keeps the risk.

Pricing

Free to download with in-app purchases, and there is no public pricing page — talesrpg.app has none. The same purchase costs a different amount depending on which phone you are holding, which is unusual enough in this directory to be worth a table of its own. US prices, verified on the App Store listing and confirmed for Android by the developer, 1 September 2026:

Item	iPhone	Android
Monthly subscription	$17.99	$16.99
Starter Pack	$4.99	$5.99
Adventure Pack	$11.99	$11.99
Epic Pack	$22.99	$21.99
Extra character slots (per 5)	$3.99	$3.49

It is not a straight surcharge. The subscription, the Epic Pack and the character slots are all a little dearer on iPhone; the Starter Pack is a dollar cheaper there. The pattern is Apple’s fixed price tiers rounding to the nearest step it allows, where Google Play lets a developer set the number outright — so the recurring cost, which is the one that matters over a campaign, runs a dollar a month higher on iOS.

Which side is the real one is answered by where the players are. The Play listing carries 837 ratings and 10,000+ installs; the App Store listing carries 11 ratings. The developer told us plainly that he quoted Android because that is where his playerbase is, and the store numbers agree with him.

Dice skins for the D&D mode run from $1.49 for a single die up to $11.99 for a Collector’s Edition pack. Those sit below the five items the App Store surfaces, so they are the developer’s figures rather than ones we could check.

Verdict

Tales RPG is better than grabbing a general-purpose model and playing inside it, and not by much. It is free to start, it is on every platform you own, it will not put words in your character’s mouth, and the skills and equipment underneath give it more structure than the raw-chat approach it improves on. It will also never tell you no. 2.8 out of 5.

Product names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Arcanum is not affiliated with Tales RPG, and neither is affiliated with or endorsed by Wizards of the Coast; “Dungeons & Dragons (D&D)” is the name Tales RPG gives one of its story modes.