The Wanderer reading room

Game Reviews

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.

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OMORI

A turn-based RPG that splits its time between a colourful dream world and a grounded, emotionally heavy reality, built around themes of grief and mental health with a level of care that's earned it one of the most devoted followings of any recent indie RPG.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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Once Human

A genuinely strange free survival MMO whose defining flaw — seasonal servers that wiped everything you built — has quietly been fixed, while its veterans have moved on to a different argument entirely.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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OneShot

A short, genuinely inventive puzzle adventure that reaches outside the game window to talk to you — 98.3% positive, and if you're on Linux or Steam Deck you should buy a different version of it.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Ooblets

A deeply weird, deeply charming farming and creature-collector hybrid that resolves disputes with dance battles instead of combat — arriving on Steam years late and still trailing a genuinely ugly 2019 controversy that has little to do with the game itself.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Outer Wilds

A time-loop mystery about a tiny solar system that "everyone says" you need to experience knowing nothing about — Overwhelmingly Positive at 95.6%, and honest enough with itself that its own top negative review is a genuinely unresolved crowdfunding controversy, not a design flaw.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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Overcooked! 2

A beloved chaotic co-op cooking sequel whose biggest, most persistent complaint isn't about difficulty or design — it's a specific online-connectivity problem reviewers have reported in nearly every year since 2018, plus one infamous level that keeps coming up for genuine motion sickness.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Pacific Drive

A haunting, atmospheric car-survival roguelike whose single biggest obstacle to a wider audience isn't its horror or its driving physics — it's a save system that a large, consistent share of reviewers say makes the game genuinely incompatible with an interrupted life.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Papers, Please

A border-checkpoint bureaucracy simulator that turns document-checking into genuine drama, thirteen years on. Its creator says its themes have only become more relevant with time — a fact he finds less like vindication and more like a tragedy.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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Paralives

The indie life sim that spent seven years being the great Sims alternative, now 91% positive and a million copies sold — with a build mode people adore and a live mode its own supporters say isn't finished.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Path of Achra

A dark-fantasy roguelike where you spend an hour designing a character and about eight minutes watching them win — 98% positive, and its critics and its store page agree on exactly what it is.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Patrick's Parabox

A puzzle game about pushing boxes into boxes that contain themselves — 99% positive, one of the highest-rated games in this library, with a motion-sickness problem its own longest-playing critic begged the developer to fix.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Phasmophobia

One of the biggest co-op horror games ever made, sitting on 836,000 reviews and a movie deal — and, right now, absorbing the fallout of a May 2026 customisation update its own top reviews call the worst in the game's six-year history.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Planetbase

A decade-old space colony sim with a specific, detailed design complaint at the heart of its negative reviews — one terrain quirk that some players call a fatal flaw and others, including a 900-hour veteran, call simple mismanagement.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Portal 2

Fifteen years on, Portal 2 remains one of the most acclaimed puzzle games ever made — and its small, honest minority of dissent is worth hearing, from real motion-sickness reports to a considered argument that the sequel traded the original's focus for scale.

9.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Portalborn

A fully text-based, single-player MUD revival with Steam Workshop mod support — reviewed against its complete English sample plus a translated look at its small Chinese-language negative sample, whose UI complaints this review found the developer had already fixed by name.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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PowerWash Simulator

A genuinely therapeutic cleaning simulator that reviewers describe helping with anxiety and bad days alike — undercut for a real, growing share of players by achievements locked behind a fast-multiplying string of paid DLC packs.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Rabbit and Steel

MMO raid mechanics compressed into a 40-minute co-op roguelike, 97.9% positive with a perfect recent record — and a colour-clarity problem that kills players through no fault of their own.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Rayman Legends

A gorgeous, exquisitely designed 2D platformer widely regarded as a genre high point — increasingly overshadowed on Steam by a mandatory Ubisoft Connect requirement that reviewers describe wiping progress, blocking launches, and making one achievement outright impossible after Ubisoft took down its servers.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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