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 deep, punishing isometric turn-based RPG built by a single developer for players who remember loving — and being punished by — their first playthrough of Fallout 1, complete with the same build-breaking traps and a genuine wiki dependency to match.
7.5 / 10
A decade-old solo-developed RPG that redefined what a choice-driven combat system could mean, sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive across a third of a million reviews. The recurring negative review isn't a criticism of the game so much as a criticism of how impossible it is to live up to its own reputation.
9 / 10
A solo developer's sci-fi idle game with over ten interlocking systems and players who have logged thousands of hours apiece. The reception is Very Positive, and the one recurring complaint is that late-game progress stops rewarding curiosity and starts demanding one correct answer.
8 / 10
A brand-new semi-idle browser-style MMORPG that wears its RuneScape and Melvor Idle influences openly — guilds, a tabbed skill list, a world map gated by level bands — two days into Early Access and already patching multiple times a day.
7 / 10
A faithful, ambitious remake of the 1993 BBS door game Usurper — text-only dungeon crawling in a persistent world of autonomous NPCs who marry, betray and die whether you're logged in or not — built by a solo developer whose speed wins loud praise, while the game's single most-upvoted review raises real, detailed concerns about development stability.
7 / 10
A free, open-source desktop pet with 51,500 reviews at 98.3% — 84% of them Chinese — and a cloud of malware accusations that turn out to trace back to one mundane, long-fixed bug.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely brutal, spectacular power-fantasy action game that nails the Warhammer 40K Space Marine fantasy — layered with real complaints about DLC pricing, always-online requirements, and a background installer that alarmed players even after the likelier explanation turned out to be more mundane than "malware."
7.5 / 10
A gorgeous, enormous free wuxia open world with some of the most charming systems design in any live-service RPG — welded to an energy meter, five battle passes and a cosmetic gacha that its own store page describes as cosmetics-only.
7.5 / 10
A procedural storytelling tactical RPG that follows the same handful of heroes from their first pitchfork fight to old age, generating genuinely moving personal arcs — until enough playthroughs reveal the same event templates repeating underneath the charm.
8 / 10
A gorgeously presented card-battler roguelike whose steep, deliberately punishing difficulty split its launch reception sharply — genre veterans defending it as fairly hard rather than broken, newer players describing runs so polarized that skill barely seems to matter.
7.5 / 10
One of the best-feeling shooters on the market, wired into a progression system that several of its own designers appear to have disagreed about — and, after two years in Early Access, finally close to 1.0.
7.5 / 10
A free, solo-developed idle RPG on its 161st update after seven years — with a monetisation model its biggest spenders defend, and a review calling it abandoned that the patch notes flatly disprove.
7.5 / 10
An alien-planet survival and building sandbox — described by one of its own players as "stitched from Don't Starve, Terraria, Stardew Valley and RimWorld" — that launched into Early Access with a punishing hunger system and has spent thirteen straight days of near-daily patches turning early frustration into a genuinely glowing recent reception.
7.5 / 10
A handsome late-Ming soulslike carrying a Mixed badge that English-speaking players didn't give it — and a post-launch patch that changed the story out from under the people who'd finished it.
7.5 / 10
The most completely simulated economy in games, eight years of free updates, and one recurring problem — in a game about giving orders to AI, the AI is what 61 of its hundred negative reviews complain about.
7.5 / 10
A co-op survival crafting game that traps scientists inside a Half-Life-flavoured secret research facility after a containment breach, Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 41,000 Steam reviews for its inventive setting and crafting depth — with a remarkably consistent, still-current complaint that its final act and late-game content don't live up to everything that came before.
8 / 10
A solo developer in Edinburgh shipped a complete, story-driven survival-crafting game straight to 1.0 with no Early Access period — a genuine feat that's earned near-universal respect, complicated only by a real and recurring complaint that the store page sells it as something more open-ended than the tightly linear campaign it actually is.
7.5 / 10
A solo-developed, short, deliberately silly incremental about worshipping a mysterious orb and recruiting cultists to do the clicking for you — charming enough to earn 95% positive reviews, and refreshingly willing to end rather than pad itself out with an unnecessary prestige loop.
7.5 / 10
Campaign for votes by day, fight the incumbent's gangs by night, and steal each boss's supernatural power when you beat them. A genuinely novel roguelike from the Anomaly Agent studio — one day old, visibly unfinished, and carrying a 97% score that needs reading carefully.
7 / 10
Ubisoft rebuilt Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag from the ground up on the current Anvil engine rather than simply upscaling it, and the parts that made the 2013 original a fan favourite — Edward Kenway, the Jackdaw, the whole rotten, beautiful Caribbean — survive the trip largely intact. What doesn't survive as cleanly is some of the combat identity Ubisoft chose to strip out along the way.
7.5 / 10
The most beautiful open world Ubisoft has built, and the clearest case study in gaming of a cash shop reaching backwards into a game's design. Eight years on it costs NZ$19.99 and holds 89% — but the level gates it built around its XP boosters are still exactly where they were.
7.5 / 10
A brick-breaker, base-builder and roguelite mashed together into something genuinely novel — and, by a large and coherent share of its own fans, something that runs out of ideas within its first ten hours and never quite finds a reason to justify the dozens more it invites.
8 / 10
You hire desperate men, name them, watch them die, and hire more. Nine years on it's still the best mercenary-company RPG ever made — and still arguing with its own players about whether a 75% hit chance that misses four times running is good design.
8 / 10
A genuinely bizarre, endlessly quotable first-person incremental game about growing berries and sacrificing them to a sentient hole — Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 8,000 reviews and driven to virality by a streamer discovery, with an honest, consistent minority complaint that its horror-tinged mystery and mid-game unlock tree don't live up to the strength of its opening hook.
7.5 / 10
