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 physics-based cooking roguelike where ingredients tumble and collide inside a cosmic cauldron instead of cards sitting in a hand — genuinely inventive, well liked across hundreds of early reviews, and repeatedly accused by its own players of leaning on luck more than it should.
7 / 10
A funny, genuinely inventive clicker about feeding kiwis to kiwis — with a hover-click that spares your wrist, and a save-loss bug patched in 2022 that players were still reporting three months ago.
7 / 10
A co-op zombie classic still Overwhelmingly Positive 17 years on, beloved for exactly what it doesn't have — no loot boxes, no unlocks, no grind — held back for the entire span of its Steam review history by one specific, remarkably persistent complaint about its Versus community.
8 / 10
A solo developer's co-op scavenging horror-comedy that became one of the defining games of its era, still funny and still tense two years on — while its own reviews increasingly argue about whether the person who made it has moved on from it.
7.5 / 10
The black-and-white puzzle-platformer that arguably started the modern atmospheric-indie wave, still Very Positive fifteen years later — and still facing the exact same trial-and-error criticism its earliest reviewers wrote, sometimes in nearly identical words.
8.5 / 10
A free turn-based RPG built from world literature, run on a coin flip, updated every fortnight for three and a half years — and criticised almost exclusively by people with two hundred hours in it.
7.5 / 10
A classic Warcraft III-and-StarCraft-flavoured RTS from a solo developer who spent three to five years building it with a community of beta testers before MicroProse stepped in to publish its Early Access launch — and reviewer after reviewer reaches for the exact same comparison to describe it.
7.5 / 10
A lovely four-hour game about scrubbing an alien ocean clean, 98% positive, whose only real complaint was the price — and the price has since fallen 70%.
7 / 10
A free-to-play sci-fi idle RPG built around a genuine, developer-stated no-pay-to-win promise, an active in-game chat community, and an engaged solo developer — praised by a striking number of very-high-playtime reviewers, with real friction over gear durability and one serious, unverified allegation about how the launch event tracked activity.
7 / 10
A brutal, funny Mario Party from the Buckshot Roulette developer, for ten dollars — with no matchmaking, and a developer who has now said plainly that there never will be.
7.5 / 10
A handsome, deliberately linear twelve-hour crime story in 1900s Sicily that three in five buyers actually finish — released at NZ$119.95, which is the number most of its arguments are really about.
7 / 10
The best traversal in games, attached to the worst PC port Nixxes have shipped — and a top-voted review that isn't about performance at all, but about the PlayStation runtime the game installs without asking.
7.5 / 10
An excellent, warm, considerably shorter Spider-Man game — and 42 of its 100 most-helpful negative reviews reach for the same word to explain why they're annoyed: DLC.
7.5 / 10
A near-universally beloved web-swinging superhero game whose PC port has carried an unresolved, save-corrupting crash bug since the day it launched — persisting across three years of patches and still blocking full completion for some players.
8 / 10
A superb remaster of one of the best sci-fi trilogies ever made, wrapped in a DRM requirement so unpopular it dominates the negative reviews almost completely — a single-player game bought on Steam that still won't run without a separate EA login.
7.5 / 10
One person made a NZ$14.75 survivors-like that sold a million copies in a fortnight and sits at 94% across 104,643 reviews — and whose most invested players have been asking for the same balance pass since October 2025.
8 / 10
One of the greatest games ever made, rebuilt shot for shot and shipped at NZ$114.99 with performance problems Konami stopped patching in January — now 60% off, eleven months later, for reasons the review page makes obvious.
7 / 10
A visually stunning metroidvania whose reviews split sharply on one specific mechanic — permanent health loss tied to the story — that several players call the moment the game turns from a favorite into a frustration, and others say isn't nearly as punishing as it's made out to be.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely inventive fusion of Metroidvania exploration and Pokémon-style monster taming with real tactical depth, undercut for a large share of its own fans by a late-game boss-scaling system that turns an excellent first twenty hours into a grind many never finish.
7 / 10
A charming, Ghibli-inspired post-apocalyptic crafting and farming life-sim that's built a genuinely devoted, cross-generational fanbase over six years — while a long, consistent thread of its own reviews keeps arguing the developers never quite finished fixing it.
7 / 10
A free, PS1-textured love letter to World at War and Black Ops 1's original Zombies mode, built by a small team that shipped ten hotfixes in its first five days — including one that directly fixed the exact balance complaint players were posting about at the same time.
8 / 10
A genuine landmark action RPG whose Steam version spent four years as a warning label of its own — a beloved, philosophically ambitious game shipped in a technically broken PC port that Square Enix quietly fixed on a different storefront first.
8.5 / 10
A hand-drawn Taopunk action-platformer that translates Sekiro's deflection combat into 2D with remarkable precision — and asks you to accept that parrying is the only real answer it has.
8.5 / 10
The most complete redemption story in gaming, a decade on. The 2016 launch reviews and the 2026 ones are describing almost different games — and the newest wave of criticism has nothing to do with the old one.
8 / 10
