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 NZ$4.79 incremental about shooting asteroids and dropping the ore into a Plinko machine. Its achievement curve is the flattest this library has measured — almost everyone who buys it finishes it — and its prestige system is the one part that doesn't work.
7 / 10
A five-day-old Early Access boomer-shooter roguelite from a solo developer, blending Ultrakill-style movement combat with Risk of Rain-style item stacking and a boss roster drawn from world mythology — an unusually strong Early Access opening, read here as exactly that rather than a finished verdict.
7.5 / 10
A decade-old 4X space strategy game beloved enough to produce reviewers with 2,000+ hours logged — and, since 2024, a wave of those exact same veteran players turning against Paradox over DLC pricing, a specific performance regression, and player-reported AI-generated content.
7 / 10
Four years on, 97.2% positive across 176,389 reviews — and its critics are still arguing that the only reason it scores that well is that you play as a cat.
8.5 / 10
A Prohibition-era mafia idle/incremental with 5,000-plus words of dialogue, ten narrative ascensions and multiple endings — well liked by most of its early players, with a save-wiping bug at the finish line that the developer appears to have patched days after two reviewers independently reported it.
7 / 10
A free incremental with one reviewer clocking 31,732 hours and a persistent complaint from the rest — that a game with "idle" in its title keeps asking you to click.
7 / 10
A card-shop management game that nails ten hours better than almost anything — and whose most-visible criticism, AI-generated art, turns out to have been answered in 2024 and has since vanished from its reviews.
7 / 10
In 2024 its players review-bombed it out of love, demanding Valve fix the bots. Two years on, negative reviews have collapsed to a handful a year and 94 of the last 100 are positive. The campaign worked.
8.5 / 10
An outstanding fighting game that added a cash shop and premium battle pass two months after launch, then spent a year buffing offence until its own 300-hour veterans stopped recognising it — and is only now climbing back.
7 / 10
The cult-classic CRPG built on a genuinely radical idea — that ending up in combat means your character build or your dialogue choices already failed — and a decade later, still the purest expression of a philosophy most of its own genre never dared attempt.
7 / 10
A first-person melee roguelike built on a custom, hand-written CPU software renderer by a solo developer with a small but devoted following — several of whom address him by name in their reviews and are already asking what he builds next.
7 / 10
Nine years, 60 DLC packs and 201,251 reviews — and unlike other DLC-heavy giants, here the store really is the complaint, because what's behind the paywall isn't extra content but the equipment you need.
7 / 10
A game whose central mechanic is a 400-day countdown that runs whether you play or not — the most literal treatment of idle time anyone has attempted, and it's 92.3% positive six years on.
8 / 10
A genuinely frightening co-op horror game that's 93.9% positive — and whose most invested players, with sixty-hour averages, are now leaving negative reviews over the studio's use of AI-generated art.
7.5 / 10
A terraforming survival-crafting game that turns a barren world into a breathable one in front of your eyes — beloved for exactly that transformation, and honestly criticized by a consistent minority for being addictive without offering much real friction or danger.
8 / 10
A survivors-like roguelike that reads the lyrics of any MP3 you import and turns each word into a battlefield effect — reviewed on a complete, unanimously positive 22-review sample from a solo developer's first days in Early Access.
8 / 10
The most austere game Zachtronics ever made, and the one whose store page promises least — which is exactly why it rates higher than the siblings that promised more.
8 / 10
Eleven years old, free now, and still the most tactically interesting shooter ever made — with a store page whose 82% badge is averaging a decade of paid-game reviews against a free-to-play relaunch its own players rate ten points lower.
7.5 / 10
A modern 3D reimagining of Toaplan's 1988 arcade shmup Truxton, made by the original studio with the original director returning — and received with a depth of emotion this genre rarely gets from reviewers who never expected to see this series again.
8.5 / 10
A game about a small fox that hands you an instruction manual in a language you can't read and lets that single idea carry an entire adventure — and a soulslike hiding inside a Zelda costume, which is where most of its arguments start.
8.5 / 10
Build a working CPU from NAND gates upward — a genuinely singular idea, sold as education, and 57 of its 100 most-helpful negative reviews say the teaching is the part that doesn't work.
7.5 / 10
A physics-based climbing platformer built around controlling each arm independently with two mice or two analogue sticks — a genuinely novel mechanic, a soundtrack that draws unusually specific praise, and a reception so consistently glowing this review had to look hard to find the real complaints underneath it.
8.5 / 10
The spiritual successor to Theme Hospital that launched rough — pathing bugs, a missing copy-paste room button, repetitive late-game hospitals — and, unusually for this library, has visibly improved rather than declined as measured by its own negative-review volume over time.
8 / 10
97.4% positive across 239,293 reviews, still in Early Access after nearly six years — and it set its all-time player record in February 2026, more than five years after launch.
9 / 10
