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 score-attack FPS from the solo creator of cult classic Devil Daggers that a professional game designer called one of the decade's most significant releases — and that the developer's own store page warns can trigger photosensitive seizures.
7 / 10
A solo-developed Early Access idler about clicking your way from dirt and sticks to iron tools and beyond, sold with a self-aware "brutal grinder" pitch that mostly delivers -- but comes with a rough spreadsheet-style interface and a save wipe waiting at the 1.0 finish line.
7 / 10
A narrative-driven tactical RPG about an insurance adjuster who has to deny a claim and save the world, mixing Fire Emblem-style grid combat with a fully voiced dating-sim layer and a time-management system some players find liberating and others find punishing.
8 / 10
A six-month side story that began life as DLC for Infinite Wealth and still plays like one in places, following Kazuma Kiryu through his faked-death years under the alias Joryu. The brawling and the finale land; the padding in between and a price tag built for a longer game are the recurring complaints from its own audience.
7.5 / 10
Read review of Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name
A JRPG-flavoured roguelite auto-battler that pairs 3D diorama backdrops with pixel-art units and trait-based synergies, landing strong small-scale reviews for its combos even as players compare its interface unfavourably to the genre's biggest name.
7.5 / 10
A yandere-dating-sim premise that flips into psychological horror within its first minutes, and one of 2024's biggest indie viral hits — reviewed here with a specific, verifiable colorblind-accessibility gate its own community flagged, and a look at why a mostly-linear, five-hour game became a genre-defining moment anyway.
7.5 / 10
A genetics-driven frog-breeding sim from one half of the APICO team, built around discovering and cross-breeding dozens of frog species across a waking and a dreaming world -- beautifully drawn and warmly received, with real friction in its navigation, inventory and pacing that a year and a half of updates hasn't fully resolved.
8 / 10
A neon-pixel run-and-gun roguelite that wears its Binding of Isaac influence openly and well enough to earn Strong critical reviews and a Very Positive Steam score, though a real share of players say the grindy unlock structure and a shrinking item pool wear thin faster than the genre's best.
7 / 10
Nomada Studio's follow-up to the beloved GRIS is gorgeous by near-universal agreement and just as consistently marked down by its own fans for one specific addition — combat — that a majority of its detailed critics say undercuts the emotional, puzzle-led magic that made its predecessor a modern classic.
7.5 / 10
Team Ninja's samurai-era Souls-like pairs one of the deepest stance-based combat systems in the genre with a Diablo-style loot flood that a large, vocal share of its own fans say fights against everything the combat is trying to do -- a disagreement that hasn't moved in nine years of reviews.
7.5 / 10
A darkly satirical colony sim crossed with a first-person roguelite shooter, where you build a totalitarian regime and personally lead mechanised assaults against alien threats — a strong Early Access launch overshadowed for some players by the game's previous life as an NFT-funded project called Earth From Another Sun.
7 / 10
One of the finest metroidvanias in years, nearly universally loved on its own merits and just as consistently marked down by its own players for a mandatory Ubisoft Connect launcher — a friction so persistent it's still generating complaints in 2026, on a game whose acclaimed development team Ubisoft disbanded within weeks of release after a sequel was refused.
8 / 10
A falling-sand physics factory game — every grain, drop and spark is a simulated resource — that went into Early Access on 13 August 2026 to a near-unanimous reception, backed by Hooded Horse and pre-release press comparing it to Factorio, Terraria and Noita all at once.
8 / 10
A solo-developer idle/incremental game about growing a server farm from a battered laptop to planet-scale compute — three genuinely distinct minigames, a finite Singularity ending that Steam's own achievement data shows a striking share of players actually reach, and no microtransactions or ads anywhere on a NZ$4.79 price tag.
8 / 10
Asymmetric's prohibition-era, Lovecraft-flavoured follow-up to the award-winning West of Loathing -- Overwhelmingly Positive on its own considerable merits, with a review sample so consistently framed against its beloved predecessor that "not quite West of Loathing" is practically this game's second title.
8 / 10
A solo developer's genuinely distinctive idle cafe that lives quietly on your taskbar while you work, doubling as a real productivity tool with a built-in Pomodoro timer and task list — warmly reviewed for its ambient jazz and hands-off charm, with minor rough edges around its tutorial and a couple of upgrade-gated features some reviewers feel should be free from the start.
7 / 10
A storybook-framed JRPG/CRPG hybrid about hunting an immensely powerful dragon, built around a genuinely deep character-building system that draws real praise — sitting at Very Positive on Steam, though this review's full read of its negative sample finds a persistent grind for build progression and a real handful of UI and crafting bugs underneath the praise.
7 / 10
A charming, Pikmin-inspired storybook fantasy adventure about two runaway children commanding a herd of forest spirits -- Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam for its art and atmosphere, with a consistent, specific complaint that its combat and controls never match the genre giant it invites comparison to.
7.5 / 10
A mystery-investigation adventure game set in an oriental fantasy city of humans, dragons and anthropomorphic "beastlings," Very Positive across 154 English-language reviews for its writing and cast -- and consistently misjudged from its cover art, with reviewers repeatedly reassuring newcomers put off by the furry-adjacent character designs that there's nothing adult about it, just a slow-starting, dialogue-heavy story that most reviewers say pays off.
7 / 10
A VR-only mech-punching roguelite that reviewers routinely call one of the best physics games the headset has, praised for locomotion so smooth it solves VR's usual nausea problem — reviewed here as a genuinely mature release, since Steam's own patch history shows it's still being actively expanded two and a half years after launch, multiplayer included.
8 / 10
A solo developer's nearly two-year passion project, a procedurally-generated first-person voxel mining and exploration game with light AI-uprising narrative, released for NZ$1.49 in June 2023 with a perfect, if very small, positive review record.
7 / 10
A solo-developer chatroom-fishing game that turned into one of 2024's biggest indie surprises, sitting Overwhelmingly Positive across 70,000+ reviews — but a full read of its negative sample and Steam's own announcement feed shows a game whose developer has gone quiet since January 2025, leaving a well-documented lobby-security problem unresolved.
7 / 10
A surreal, Love-de-Lic-inspired adventure about a cursed intelligence bound to a corpse, helping a desert island's misfits across a game explicitly built around 24 replays -- one of the most positively received games this lane has covered (98.75%), with the tiny negative sample converging on a specific, real complaint about late-game grind and unclear puzzle guidance.
8 / 10
A roguelite beat 'em up from the Streets of Rage 4 team that critics and players both rate as one of 2025's genre highlights -- hand-drawn combat and worldbuilding that land almost universally, undercut by real multiplayer stability issues and a vocal minority who find its Hades-shaped meta-progression more familiar than fresh.
8 / 10
