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.
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
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
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 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 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 Scottish Highlands colony sim that deliberately swaps RimWorld's raids and pirate attacks for winters, in-laws and beekeeping — four years into Early Access, with monthly patches still landing and the same comparison still following it everywhere.
7 / 10
A relaxing 2D resource-gathering and building game about a wizard's apprentice clicking their way off a remote island, Very Positive across 1,520 Steam reviews for its handcrafted pixel art and deliberately small, non-exploding numbers -- undercut by one loud, consistent complaint that has followed it since launch week: a game marketed and tagged as a clicker/incremental has no automation at all.
7 / 10
A 40-minute narrative clicker from Strange Scaffold about a masked man who wants to watch you thumb a tally counter — critically adored as a piece of writing about labour and discomfort, and just as consistently criticised by its own reviewers for stretching a five-minute idea across a full session of repetitive clicking.
7 / 10
A voxel-styled match puzzle that swaps the usual click-and-swap for sliding whole rows and columns like a stone tablet, wraps it in a roguelite deckbuilding run, and backs it with a real 8-player online mode that almost nobody is around to fill.
7 / 10
An Australian-outback survival life-sim that earned four years of goodwill in Early Access, then spent most of it in six weeks when its solo developer sold publishing rights to KRAFTON and the resulting EULA sparked one of Steam's more pointed 2025 backlashes.
7 / 10
A tiny, genuinely one-of-a-kind dungeon crawler played entirely inside the Windows File Explorer — drag your character folder into new rooms, equip loot by dropping files into an equipment folder, fight in auto-resolved combat narrated by a console window — that earned a clean 100% positive Steam reception for an idea executed with real charm, even though the combat underneath the gimmick is thin and most runs are over in under two hours.
7 / 10
Read review of Directory Dungeon: File Explorer Dungeon Crawler
A charming, deeply likeable Disney life-sim whose 2022 Early Access promise of an eventual free-to-play release was formally scrapped in 2023 — a well-documented reversal that still shapes how existing players talk about the game more than two years later.
7 / 10
A cheap, frenetic top-down shooter where a destruction witch demolishes dungeon walls instead of fighting through them, Very Positive on Steam for a tight, satisfying thirty-minute main campaign that unlocks a genuinely addictive Endless Mode -- with a small but specific negative sample flagging balance and localization rough edges around the edges of an otherwise well-loved power fantasy.
7 / 10
A maze-building tower defense roguelite that fuses Warcraft 3 custom-map nostalgia with Slay the Spire-style deckbuilding, sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive across 2,486 reviews — but a full read of its negative sample finds the same specific complaint recurring for two straight years, that the concept has outgrown the content built to support it.
7.5 / 10
A co-op liminal-space horror game that rode the Backrooms internet craze into Early Access in 2022, spent three years earning a huge audience on atmosphere and jump-scares with friends, and is still being actively patched onto new consoles four years later.
7.5 / 10
A hand-painted, alternate-history JRPG about an alcoholic Slovak knight fighting Hussite raiders and folkloric horrors, beloved almost entirely for its art, music, and sheer strangeness — while its own reviewers, even most of the positive ones, agree the turn-based combat underneath is thin and the three-to-four-hour runtime is a tough sell at its price.
7 / 10
A NZ$5.99 idle RPG that dresses an 11-skill crafting-and-progression system up as a joke about spinning a fidget spinner impossibly fast, from a solo developer who patched constantly through Early Access and then went almost completely silent after the September 2023 1.0 launch.
7 / 10
A stylish hybrid of deck-building and turn-based tactics staged as John Wick-style action- movie fight choreography -- Very Positive on Steam, with a consistent balance and replayability complaint against genre giants like Slay the Spire, and a recent, specific monetisation grievance from its most invested players.
7 / 10
A goblin who robs dungeons by night and haggles over the loot by day, split between a genuinely good pixel-art Metroidvania and a shopkeeper sim that keeps overriding it — the game is at its best exactly when it lets you forget the rent is due again in three days.
7 / 10
A solo-developer, text-only ASCII RPG that closed a disciplined ten-week Early Access run with a genuinely huge 1.0 patch — 328 skills levelled by doing, 190 classes across seven tiers reached through evolve-or-merge choices, and a NZ$7.89 price with no ads, no microtransactions and no sound at all.
7.5 / 10
