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 35th-anniversary cute-em-up that swaps the Cotton series' usual magical kingdom for a Japanese festival backdrop, brings back the well-received Cotton Rock'n'Roll team, and stacks ten wildly different playable ships — several borrowed wholesale from other cult shmups — on top of a launch corpus too small to confirm anything beyond the pedigree.
7.5 / 10
A solo-developed, Bevy-built wizard-defense roguelite where four playable archetypes control like four different games, released eight days ago to just two Steam reviews and a five-patch first week.
7 / 10
A solo developer's low-poly horror shooter about rescuing seven kidnapped DJs from a building full of murderous ravers, built around letting players load in their own music.
7 / 10
A tower-defense game where the enemy isn't units but a fluid — cellular automata standing in for an AI, spreading through terrain rather than pathing along it. Reviewed on its full lifetime and recent Steam review corpora, an 11-year-old cult favourite that some of its own harshest critics have played for thousands of hours.
8.5 / 10
A solo-developed, SNES-style turn-based JRPG that swaps generic fantasy kingdoms for real-world cities and ancient ruins — reviewed on launch day, when its entire public review corpus is zero, against what the developer has actually built and documented.
7 / 10
A deep, spreadsheet-and-tactics management sim built around Counter-Strike esports — fictional teams and a genuinely detailed match engine, launched a month after a licensed rival and priced above it, with a four-review Steam page too thin to confirm much yet.
7 / 10
A 2-4 player co-op mining game about sharing one wallet, one pool of light and one simple goal — go deeper than your last run — where gas pockets, earthquakes and radiation punish anyone who pushes past what their gear can survive.
7 / 10
A 2008 tower defense game that still sits at 96% positive across 5,363 reviews, built around one clean idea — you can block a path, not just guard it — and honest enough about its own limits that its harshest critics are the players who logged thousands of hours first.
8 / 10
A free high-school rom-com visual novel that lets you play the romance or play the matchmaker, fully voiced in three languages, with nothing behind a paywall — the third clean release in a row from a studio that has quietly earned the right to be trusted on that point.
7 / 10
A one-million-word ChoiceScript interactive novel about a shipwrecked clan finding a new home, nine years in public development before its Steam launch, with one of its two writers carrying a genuinely Very Positive track record on the same imprint and zero independent reviews yet to confirm anything else.
7 / 10
A side-scrolling farming sim that spent roughly fifteen months in Early Access before its 5 August 2026 graduation to 1.0, pairing Stardew-style crop and relationship systems with vertical platform building, gene-splicing crops, and bullet-hell drone combat against the ruins of a collapsed world.
8.2 / 10
Real chess rules underneath a board that fights back — pieces carry hit points and their own fog-of-war vision, captures aren't guaranteed kills, and a mid-turn real-time window lets you burn a cooldown spell before the clock passes to your opponent. Two days into Early Access it already has a working single-player mode against AI, up to four-player online lobbies, and eight patches.
7 / 10
A day-old precision speedrunner that makes you spend your own health bar as a resource — slow time, cut down enemies mid-air, and burn "Echoes" for shortcuts and boosts across fifteen handcrafted courses, each chasing a five-rung Bronze-through-Par medal ladder.
7 / 10
A text-based football world generator where you don't pick a lineup or call a tactic — you only approve or reject the transfers clubs propose, then watch decades of invented history unfold. A genuinely different angle on football management, launched with a five-review Steam page and some sharp early complaints about its own core promise.
7 / 10
A real-time roguelike dungeon crawl where the resource system is a Picross grid — solve Nonogram puzzles fast enough and correctly enough to charge the energy that fuels every attack, shield and finisher.
7 / 10
A solo-developed roguelike from Istanbul that turns career survival into a weekly trading floor — clear your student debt or get walked out, across three branching story threads and nine endings, for a one-time NZ$9.99.
7 / 10
A dark fantasy deckbuilding roguelike wrapped around a guild-management hub — recruit from ten heroes, send a three-person party into the abyss with permadeath on the line, and spend what they bring back on facilities that keep the next run alive.
7 / 10
Ars Goetia's solo-developed sequel adds first-person combat, a real-time-seconds twist on turn-based fighting and a forged-not-found loot system to the original Hellslave formula. Three days after launch it is loved in English and considerably more divided in the Simplified Chinese corpus that makes up nearly half its reviews, for a reason the developer had already half-fixed by the time this was written.
7 / 10
A tactical tower defense from solo developer Tearevo built around one flying fortress under siege from every direction — a hex-grid network of turrets, resource collectors and support modules, split between grounded sieges and scrolling air battles, with a roguelite boost draw and a between-mission tech tree layered on top.
7 / 10
A Chinese-developed roguelike bullet-hell shooter about a hero possessed by an escaped demon king, wrapping a huge auto-attack build-crafting system and a class-change progression ladder in an RPG genre tag it only half earns.
7 / 10
The 2011 browser game that helped drag tower defense out of the Flash-portal era and into a genre of its own, still sitting at 96% positive on Steam a decade after its 2014 Unity port — mostly because the core loop of towers, heroes and boss fights it invented is still the one every entry since, including Ironhide's own sequels, gets measured against.
8.5 / 10
An incremental heist game that flips the loot-RPG premise on its head — heroes clear the dungeons and find the treasure, and you play the goblin who steals it back from them while they're still inside.
7 / 10
A one-day-old Japanese horror walking sim whose entire hook is a gaze-driven fog of war — the neighbourhood only exists where you're actually looking, and looking is also how the thing hunting you finds you. Reviewed on launch day, against zero Steam reviews and the developer's own two-title track record.
7 / 10
A three-day-old Early Access idle RPG that runs thirteen separate skill trackers off one RuneScape-flavoured template, lets you train two of them at once, and caps its offline catch-up at a clearly documented 24 hours — for a one-time NZ$4.31 with no reviews, no achievements curve worth reading, and a developer FAQ that admits the balance still needs work.
7 / 10
