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 hundred-and-eighteen-hour median playtime and 92% of recent reviews positive — this is one of the best crafting RPGs anyone has made. It also sells a multiplayer mode with no story in it, and NZ$122 of small DLC on top of a NZ$70 game.
7.5 / 10
A hex-grid roguelike that swaps a conventional deck for a board you draft and build tile by tile, from the maker of the well-regarded mobile hit Cards of Terra — hitting 1.0 to a small but completely unanimous chorus of praise after what several reviewers admit was months of criminally low visibility.
8 / 10
A genuine revival of one of action gaming's most demanding franchises, co-developed by PlatinumGames and Team Ninja, launching to widespread praise for its combat within days of the death of series creator Tomonobu Itagaki — undercut by a real, consistently repeated identity debate among longtime fans over how much of the game feels like Platinum's own house style rather than classic Ninja Gaiden.
7.5 / 10
An ARPG's worth of build synergy packed into an Asteroids cabinet, at thirteen dollars and 96% positive. The one thing standing between it and everybody is the control scheme — and that's a deliberate choice the game is literally named after.
8 / 10
The long-awaited official Steam release of one of indie RPG history's most influential cult classics — a surreal, unsettling 2008 RPG Maker game credited as a direct inspiration for Undertale, Deltarune, Omori and OneShot — undercut for longtime fans by a completely replaced soundtrack, a change with a specific, well-documented and genuinely sympathetic reason behind it.
7.5 / 10
Six years in Early Access, and the 1.0 landed this week. You play a broke shipbreaker with a loan and a flying coffin, building a ship out of salvage one bolt at a time. Nothing else does what it does — and its own most devoted players think it needed another year.
7.5 / 10
A hundred thousand copies in its first week, and deservedly — you play a single parasite tearing organelles out of immune cells and grafting them onto your own body. The best twin-stick roguelite of the year so far, with one genuinely misleading line on its store page.
8.5 / 10
A bold, deliberately alienating reinvention of Ice-Pick Lodge's cult plague-town saga — swapping the survival-sim hunger and infection management longtime fans loved for a time-looping detective mystery — that landed Very Positive on Steam even as a genuine, detailed split opened up among the series' own most devoted players.
7 / 10
A breakout co-op climbing hit from a small Landfall-affiliated team, selling millions of copies for NZ$11.99 and earning genuine, chaotic devotion from its players — briefly overshadowed by a real, well-documented EULA controversy the developers reversed within days, and by two specific, widely repeated complaints (no save option, a punishing difficulty spike) that a remarkably attentive year of patches has since substantively addressed.
8.5 / 10
The game that brought the isometric party RPG back from the dead, and spent a decade being judged against a memory of Baldur's Gate rather than on its own terms. Fewer than half its buyers finish Act I — but the ones who push through average eighty hours.
8 / 10
You brew potions by physically dragging a pestle across a map of alchemical effects, and it's one of the best crafting mechanics anyone has invented. The argument isn't whether it's good — it's whether a brilliant idea that stopped being developed is worth twenty-nine dollars.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely fresh, emotionally resonant sci-fi shoot-and-hack adventure from Capcom, six years after its original 2020 announcement, praised near-universally for its unusual father-daughter bond and inventive combat — undercut for a real, consistently repeated share of the sample by a combat loop that grows repetitive in its back half, and by genuine, well-documented Denuvo DRM access problems affecting even paying, non-piloting players.
8 / 10
Arkane Austin's 2017 immersive sim remains Very Positive across more than 54,000 Steam reviews, widely regarded as one of the genre's finest achievements — a reputation this review can confirm survived the closure of the very studio that made it, when Arkane Austin was shut down entirely by Microsoft in 2024, and a real controversy over the game's own title, which this review can confirm Bethesda forced onto an unrelated story over the objections of Arkane's own founder.
8 / 10
The game that invented the shopkeeper RPG, sixteen years old and still 96% positive. Every buy-low-sell-high game since owes it something — and most of them dropped the one idea that made it work.
8 / 10
A survival-horror triumph in its first half and a widely-debated tonal collapse in its second, wrapped around Capcom's biggest launch of the year — Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 100,000 Steam reviews and 8 million copies sold, while a large, detailed share of that same sample argues the game falls apart exactly when it should be building toward its climax.
8 / 10
A meticulously accurate recreation of running a 1990s video rental store — verified as authentic by actual former Blockbuster employees in its own review section — undercut by a remarkably consistent complaint that nothing you build ever changes how the game actually plays.
7.5 / 10
The game that invented the thing every roguelite now does — you die, your heir inherits, and the upgrades stay. Thirteen years later its founding criticism is still the genre's central argument, and its own sequel does it better.
7.5 / 10
The sequel that fixed nearly everything wrong with the original — and got criticised for it. Its sharpest reviewers say the classes are now too balanced and every run plays the same. Both things are true, and that's the interesting part.
8 / 10
A physics-based dice-fusion roguelite that nails its central hook — launching dice across a battlefield to trigger magical merge chains — then shipped with runs so short that the loudest launch complaint was "where's the rest of the game," a criticism the developer answered directly with a free Classic Mode update a month later.
7 / 10
Eight years after release and still getting a major update every month, Rust remains the most uncompromising survival game ever made — and the one whose own veterans write the funniest negative reviews about how much of their lives it took.
8 / 10
A scratch-card incremental that swaps the usual "buy 10" button for a mouse dragged across a lottery ticket, and turns out to be one of the most purely satisfying opening hours the genre has produced this year — right up until the point where the tickets stop having anything new to say.
7 / 10
A solo-developed, critically adored twin-stick shooter from a Housemarque alumnus, widely hailed by its own fanbase as a spiritual successor to Geometry Wars — Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam with a 93 Metascore, undercut for many players by a steep, unevenly tutorialised difficulty curve that even genre veterans describe as a genuine barrier to entry.
8 / 10
A free browser incremental that turns a single click-to-catch-fish button into a full sea-life economy, an artifact-driven prestige loop and — almost uniquely for the genre — a real ending, even though its own developers insist it isn't actually an idle game.
7 / 10
A fan remake that outgrew the game it copied, and has been updated every year for a decade. It's free on Android, open source on GitHub, and carries no ads or purchases of any kind — so the interesting question isn't whether it's good. It's why you'd ever pay for it.
8.5 / 10
