The Wanderer reading room
Idle RPGs, MMOs, browser games and mobile RPGs, taken apart properly. Every review carries a score out of 10, what the game does well, what it does badly, and the kind of player it is actually for.
Featured review
The Paper Mario game a huge share of its own reviewers say Nintendo stopped making — turn-based RPG combat, real puzzle-solving abilities, genuine charm — built by a small independent team instead, and rarely called out for anything beyond a handful of specific, old-school JRPG design choices.
8.5 / 10
Bug Fables is unapologetic about its inspiration — turn-based combat built around timed hits and party abilities that double as overworld puzzle tools, in the specific style Paper Mario built its reputation on before drifting away from it. A remarkably large share of its own reviewers frame that directly: this is the Paper Mario game Nintendo stopped making, built instead by a small independent studio, and it's rare to find a game this openly derivative praised this consistently for actually earning the comparison.
Every review carries as many genres as it honestly is — an idle RPG appears under both.
A frenetic, jazz-scored smash-'em-up about a captive gorilla tearing through procedurally shuffled levels — Overwhelmingly Positive at 95%, with a small but pointed negative corpus arguing the same randomisation that makes each run fresh also makes it impossible to practice or master a level, on a game most reviewers, positive and negative alike, finish in under two hours.
8 / 10
One of survival gaming's defining sandbox games, whose Mostly Positive 80% across 332,096 reviews now sits under a live, furious controversy — official servers sunset in 2023 to push players toward a paid Unreal Engine 5 remaster after reviewers cite an archived tweet promising that exact upgrade would be free, and a 2025 update reviewers say broke years of mods, maps and communities on the way out.
5.5 / 10
A solo-developed, old-school text RPG with a genuinely rare feature — a fully screen-reader-accessible interface built for blind players from the ground up — that quietly launched on iOS in March 2024 before reaching Steam in September 2025 with a perfect, if tiny, 11-for-11 positive review record.
8 / 10
A gorgeous, minimalist real-time tactics roguelite where you evacuate a doomed Viking-era island kingdom one procedurally shaped island at a time — Very Positive at 93.2% across 6,561 reviews for seven years running, with a remarkably consistent complaint from its own fans that the whole experience is over, and starts repeating itself, well before it should be.
7 / 10
A free city-building clicker whose own achievement list requires replaying the entire game roughly 60 times for full completion, sitting on top of a Mixed 65% built from two very different arguments — reviewers who call the active, worker-assignment gameplay "not real idle" and reviewers who report resources vanishing every time they close and reopen it.
4 / 10
A gorgeous voxel-built cyberpunk delivery-driver story that most of its own fans agree is close to a walking (or rather, flying) simulator — Very Positive at 86.2% across 8,209 reviews, propped up almost entirely by atmosphere and writing, with an unusually large and specific negative corpus arguing the actual moment-to-moment gameplay barely exists.
6.5 / 10
A mobile-to-Steam idle production-line game with a genuinely well-regarded crafting chain buried under aggressive monetisation and, more seriously, a documented save-reliability problem — one top-voted reviewer reports losing an entire weekend of event progress despite manually saving before logging off.
4.5 / 10
A genuinely inventive two-character roguelike deckbuilder that spent two years earning real enthusiasm in Early Access, then went silent — the developer's own news feed shows a "temporary suspension of regular updates" posted in May 2022 that was never followed up on, and the word "Abandoned" is now the single most common one-word review title in its history.
4 / 10
A free space-conquest idle clicker whose 1.0 release tried to fix its most notorious complaint — AI-generated art — with a full visual overhaul, only for a meaningful slice of players to say the replacement still looks and feels AI-made; layered on top of a monetisation structure multiple long-time players call genuinely predatory, this is Mostly Positive at 71.5% for reasons its own detailed critics dispute in detail.
4.5 / 10
A Slay the Spire-style roguelike deckbuilder built around confronting phobias with coping-mechanism cards — a genuinely distinctive premise that a meaningful share of its own reviewers, including a reviewer identifying as a psychology lecturer, say the game doesn't earn, on top of a separate, more familiar complaint that the card system itself is too shallow to sustain repeat runs.
5 / 10
A charming coin-pusher-arcade roguelike deckbuilder whose single most-upvoted review isn't about the gameplay at all — a detailed technical audit documenting telemetry that fired before the opt-in screen and persisted after opt-out, which the publisher patched out only after the report went public — sitting alongside a separate, more ordinary complaint that the concept is more satisfying to describe than to actually play.
6.5 / 10
A free, solo-developed idle roguelike that spent a full year in Early Access before its 9 May 2025 1.0 exit — Mixed at 64% lifetime across a small but genuinely long-playing corpus, whose own most-invested critics (one at over 4,700 hours) describe a game whose systems, especially crafting, arrive far too slowly for how much waiting it asks of you.
6 / 10
A solo-developed management sim with real, distinctive depth — build and run a recreation centre down to the individual pool lane and arcade cabinet — that stopped receiving public updates in September 2022 and has spent the four years since accumulating an unusually self-aware review corpus that argues, in real time, about whether "abandoned" is fair to say out loud.
5 / 10
A NZ$3.69 mobile port that charges upfront and then layers in-app purchases on top anyway — the single complaint its small review corpus has repeated, unprompted, for eight straight years, alongside a progression wall around planet 40-60 and a broken "offline progress" promise that shows up twice, four years apart.
3.5 / 10
Square Enix's remaster of a genre-defining 1995 tactical RPG splits its own most invested fans down the middle — the presentation, voice work and orchestration draw near-unanimous praise, while the specific gameplay changes to levelling, permadeath and the class system have produced some of the most detailed, dug-in disagreement this library has read on any remaster.
7.5 / 10
A free clicker whose "AFK all you want" pitch is directly contradicted by its own players, who report zero progress while the game isn't actively running — and whose negative corpus mostly isn't complaining about the gameplay at all, but arguing this is a Steam-inventory-item farming vehicle in the mould of Banana rather than an actual idle game.
3 / 10
A surreal breakup-simulator that mashes turn-based RPG combat, skateboarding and competitive cooking into one story about confronting your exes and your family — Very Positive at 97.2% across 248 reviews, with a tiny but sharply consistent negative sample naming the same two soft spots, clunky skating and combat that turns repetitive, against writing and art almost nobody disputes.
8 / 10
A mouse-only physics rage-climber that wears its debt to Getting Over It on its sleeve — genuinely popular, genuinely generous with a free second chapter, and honest about two real problems its own players keep raising: hand strain from the controls, and a 2025 achievement rework that asked its most dedicated fans to grind fifty clears instead of one.
7 / 10
A NZ$7.39 visual novel dressed up as a clicker game from npckc, in which a hero who fails to rescue the princess spends two-odd hours making amends by growing magic berries — Very Positive at 95% of 79 reviews for its storybook art, warm cast and unusually deep accessibility options, with the one consistent complaint being that the "clicker" half thins out into repetitive quota-grinding by the later routes.
7.5 / 10
Asobo Studio's medieval sibling-survival story, built around custom tech that renders thousands of rats on screen at once -- still Very Positive on Steam seven years later for its atmosphere and setting, but with a striking, current complaint: game-breaking bugs at specific, repeatedly-named chapters that reviewers say have never been fixed.
7 / 10
A Greek-and-Roman-mythology action RPG that plays like Immortals Fenyx Rising crossed with a lighter Dark Souls — strongest in its opening hours, and still missing basic quality-of-life features four years and nine patches later.
6.5 / 10
A space-mining idle game that patched hard for ten straight months after its August 2022 Early Access launch, then went quiet in mid-2023 with its progression math still broken — four years and no 1.0 later, its own most dedicated reviewers call it the worst idle game they've played.
3.5 / 10
A solo developer's N64-throwback action RPG built around an unusually deep character creator, sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive across 18,400 reviews — but a full read of its negative sample and its own achievement data shows a game whose content pace has not kept up with nearly two years in Early Access.
7 / 10
A solo-developer "combat programming roguelike" where you build automated battle scripts out of skills and conditions and then watch them play out, Very Positive on Steam for a genuinely clever core idea -- undercut by a content ceiling most players hit within a handful of hours and a development trail that appears to have gone quiet within weeks of launch.
6.5 / 10
