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 charming, wildly inventive indie 3D platformer from a small team, its tongue-swinging, free-climbing movement earning direct, specific comparisons to Super Mario Odyssey and A Hat in Time — undercut by real, honestly documented technical rough edges, including soft-locks and physics inconsistencies, that an exceptionally responsive developer has spent months patching at a near-daily cadence since launch.
7.5 / 10
A desktop-postcard idle game about attracting and photographing over 130 real bird species, charming enough to convert players who weren't birdwatchers or idle-game fans going in — held back at launch by a genuinely rough technical start that the developer has spent the months since steadily patching away.
7.5 / 10
A genre-defying puzzle roguelike-lite set in a mysterious manor whose floor plan you draft anew each in-game day, celebrated with a 92 Metascore and widely called one of the most creative puzzle games in years — beloved specifically by players willing to take pages of physical notes, and marked by a real, still-unresolved design tension between its puzzle-solving brain and its randomised, roguelike-lite execution.
8 / 10
A gorgeous, genuinely soothing pixel-art fishing game that lets you fish actively or let an idle mode do it for you — beloved enough to have gotten real players off the couch and back onto real lakes with their own families, undercut at launch by a real, consistently documented complaint that idling outperforms actually playing, and that there simply wasn't much game underneath the vibe.
7 / 10
A nearly decade-old mobile idle RPG that still gets one thing right that most of its modern competitors don't even try — a completely fair, no-IAP, no-gacha monetisation model — and undercuts it with technical rough edges that have apparently never been fully sanded down.
7 / 10
A voxel colony-building strategy game crossing Minecraft's block-by-block construction with genuine tower-defense stakes, still in Early Access more than nine years after its 2017 debut — sustained by an unusually transparent weekly developer blog and a loyal Very Positive fanbase, with a persistent, still-current complaint that its mid-to-late game never quite matches the promise of its opening hours.
7 / 10
Pearl Abyss's massive, visually stunning open-world action-adventure launched to a rocky Mixed reception — a specific, documented 51% positive Steam score in its first days — before climbing to Very Positive within a week and staying there through five months of relentless, near-weekly patches, even as a real, ongoing thread of criticism argues the game never fully shakes its origins as an MMORPG stripped of its multiplayer.
7.5 / 10
The best character-driven strategy game ever made, and the clearest case in gaming of DLC that doesn't just add content but withholds answers. Its players log 117-hour medians and write four-hundred-vote reviews about the storefront.
7.5 / 10
The most famous broken launch in modern gaming is now, five years and one total rebuild later, one of the best open-world RPGs you can buy. Ninety-six of its hundred most recent reviews are positive. The thing to check before buying isn't the game any more — it's the licence.
9 / 10
Motive Studio's remake of the 2008 survival-horror classic remains Very Positive across nearly 70,000 Steam reviews, widely credited as one of the finest remakes ever made — a reputation undercut by a real, severe, persistent Denuvo-caused stuttering problem and a mandatory always-online requirement for an entirely single-player game, both of which this review can confirm went unfixed after EA redirected developer Motive Studio to other projects roughly two months after launch, with the studio's own pitches for a sequel subsequently rejected.
7 / 10
Kojima Productions' sequel arrived on PC nine months after its PlayStation 5 exclusive launch with one of the best-optimised AAA ports in recent memory and genuinely expanded delivery and combat systems, sitting Overwhelmingly Positive across nearly 26,000 Steam reviews — tempered by a real, remarkably consistent complaint from longtime fans that its writing, pacing and a hand-holding new companion character fall well short of the original's atmosphere and restraint.
7.5 / 10
A creature-taming roguelike deckbuilder with a genuinely distinctive hook — recruit your enemies into your deck instead of collecting pre-made cards, then lose them permanently if they die in battle — undercut for a meaningful slice of players by steep, RNG-heavy difficulty spikes that a dedicated "Difficulty Update" only partly resolved.
7 / 10
Eidos-Montreal's cyberpunk immersive sim remains Mostly Positive across more than 42,000 Steam reviews for its genuinely excellent stealth gameplay and world-building — undercut by a real, remarkably consistent complaint that its story ends abruptly mid-arc, a flaw this review can confirm the game's own writer has since publicly acknowledged, tied to a since-cancelled sequel that would have resolved it, and to real, dateable studio layoffs still affecting Eidos-Montreal as recently as March 2026.
7 / 10
A detective RPG with no combat, twenty-four skills that argue with you inside your own head, and writing that has no real rival in the medium. Its negative reviews are almost entirely from people who call it a masterpiece and ask you not to buy it.
9.5 / 10
Arkane's supernatural stealth-action sequel remains Very Positive across more than 66,000 Steam reviews, widely regarded as one of the finest immersive sims ever made — a reputation that survived a severe, well-documented 2016 launch-performance crisis this review can confirm was genuinely fixed, though a separate, newer, still-unresolved AMD CPU plus Nvidia GPU launch-failure bug persists in reviews dated as recently as August 2025, alongside real, current uncertainty over Arkane's own future following a July 2026 Xbox restructuring.
7.5 / 10
id Software's medieval-set prequel trades DOOM Eternal's frantic weapon-juggling for a slower, shield-and-parry combat framework — widely respected as a deliberate, distinct evolution even by reviewers who call it the "weakest" of the modern trilogy — shadowed by a real, well- documented Xbox layoff that cut the studio by more than half the day before its major DLC launched, and by a long-simmering, genuinely disputed soundtrack controversy resurfacing now that composer Mick Gordon hasn't returned.
7 / 10
Every hero free, nothing purchasable that affects a match, thirteen years of updates, and a median recent reviewer with 1,078 hours logged. It is also one of the least welcoming games ever made, and that is not an accident of tone — it's the cost of the depth.
8 / 10
A visually gorgeous, warmly voice-acted remake of one of the Dragon Quest franchise's most beloved and expansive entries — Very Positive on Steam, but built around a genuinely controversial decision to substantially trim the content that made the original and its 3DS remake so sprawling, a cut acknowledged even by the game's own fans rather than disputed.
7 / 10
A deckbuilding roguelite where you draw your hand by working a claw machine. The gimmick is genuinely brilliant for about twenty hours — and then the argument starts about how much of each run you're actually deciding.
7.5 / 10
Techland's return to Kyle Crane and the original Dying Light formula, widely, specifically praised as a genuine "return to form" after the divisive Dying Light 2 — backed by an unusually clean, well-optimised launch and an explicit, kept promise to ship without microtransactions — undercut for a real minority of players by parkour-unfriendly map design and a genuine, documented fairness controversy over how a later Definitive Edition treated existing Deluxe Edition owners.
7.5 / 10
A genuine, widely-acclaimed reinvention of KOEI TECMO's long-running hack-and-slash series — praised by veteran fans as the best entry in over a decade for its overhauled combat — built around a deliberate, controversial trade-off that a large share of the same fanbase argues cost the series something real: a single silent protagonist replacing the roster of dozens of playable historical officers, and a story that stops at the Battle of Chibi, leaving half the classic Three Kingdoms tale untold at launch.
8 / 10
A point-and-click adventure dressed as a 1996 educational CD-ROM, with something wrong underneath it. One of the highest-rated games on Steam this year at 99% positive — and its single-save-file design is the reason that number isn't higher still.
8.5 / 10
A dark-fantasy metroidvania sequel to the beloved Ender Lilies, trading a slower Early Access build for a widely admired 1.0 release — gorgeous, meticulously quality-of-life-focused, and Overwhelmingly Positive across nearly 17,000 reviews, with its most thoughtful critics agreeing on exactly one thing: it's a better game than its predecessor and, for some, a lesser story.
8.5 / 10
A genre-defining bullet-hell roguelike about diving through a fortress of guns to find the one weapon that can kill the past — nearly a decade old and still Overwhelmingly Positive across almost 80,000 reviews, with fans logging thousands of hours apiece, undercut by a steep, RNG-heavy difficulty curve and a still-raw 2025 controversy over online co-op arriving on mobile years before it ever reached PC or console.
8.5 / 10
