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 visually extraordinary sequel that nearly every reviewer, on both sides of the score, agrees looks and sounds better than its beloved predecessor -- while a wide majority of its critics argue the writing that made that predecessor special didn't come along for the ride.
7.5 / 10
A single Japanese developer's 15-year solo project -- a sprawling 2D action RPG that earned an Overwhelmingly Positive badge on scale and ambition alone, with a review corpus that argues hard over its writing, its grind, and whether its combat gets too busy to read.
8 / 10
A roguelike deckbuilder that swaps cards for dice and damage/block for a dual Purification/Corruption system -- gorgeous, genuinely inventive, and Very Positive on Steam, but close to half its negative reviews cite overwhelming complexity and a similar share cite dice variance that several reviewers call unfair rather than merely risky.
7 / 10
A cozy, sincerely heart-warming miniature adventure where every problem is solved by peeling and placing the right sticker — beloved almost universally, with its one real thorn being an achievement list that forces a second playthrough to fully complete.
8 / 10
A short, physics-driven incremental about buying, upgrading and prestiging a swarm of bouncing balls to smash cores -- praised by reviewers for making the genre's usual buy-order puzzle feel like an actual strategic decision, with a real, specific complaint about late-game visual effects tanking performance and triggering photosensitivity concerns.
7 / 10
A gorgeous, Kickstarted turn-based RPG built from Joe Madureira's 1990s comic, praised almost universally for its art and combat variety and just as consistently accused of burying both under grinding and pacing that never speeds up -- nine years on, the achievement data backs up exactly where players quit.
7 / 10
A Seville studio's Kickstarter-funded Metroidvania built from Spanish Holy Week processions and Goya paintings -- still Very Positive on Steam seven years and three free expansions later, with the exact same critic-and-player split that greeted it at launch: some of the best pixel art and atmosphere in the genre, wrapped around movement and combat feel a real share of players never warm to.
7.5 / 10
Koji Igarashi's Kickstarter-funded spiritual successor to Symphony of the Night is still a deep, generously-supported Metroidvania seven years on -- but a December 2025 switch to requiring Epic Online Services has visibly dragged its recent review score down from Very Positive to Mostly Positive.
7.5 / 10
A Kickstarter-funded "date your weapons" dungeon crawler from the Moon Hunters team -- Very Positive on Steam for its style, music and genuinely distinctive premise, and shadowed since launch week by a specific, heavily-upvoted complaint that its story talks about consent far more than its mechanics actually practice it.
7 / 10
Digital Sun's brick-by-brick fortress-defense strategy game turns "height equals strength" into a genuinely inventive building puzzle wrapped in striking dark fantasy art -- loved by most for exactly that, while a real minority call its systems shallower than the building toy suggests once the campaign's difficulty and pacing settle in.
7.5 / 10
A cheap, brutal, four-player climbing game that turned into one of 2024's biggest Twitch phenomena almost overnight -- rage-comedy physical comedy where the whole point is watching your friends drag you off a ledge, not a game built to survive a second playthrough.
7.5 / 10
A top-down adventure about a self-doubting painter restoring colour to a world that's lost it, from the Wandersong and Celeste team -- Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam and still drawing new five-star reviews five years on, with one consistent, specific complaint about how the painting itself controls.
8.5 / 10
A gorgeous, narrator-driven roguelite about a family of seven heroes defending their mountain from a spreading Corruption -- still Very Positive on Steam seven years on, with a remarkably consistent complaint pattern: reviewers love the pixel art and story, and just as consistently find the combat repetitive and the co-op unreliable.
7 / 10
A genuinely inventive fusion of arcade coin-pusher physics and idle hero-collection RPG, loved by a real audience for a hybrid nobody else has built properly, undercut by rough English localization and a mid-game grind that several long-term players say goes flat.
7 / 10
A solo-developer job-system JRPG built for players who want Final Fantasy V's class depth without any hand-holding -- widely loved for exactly that reason, and just as widely criticised for making platforming mandatory and its endgame punishingly unbalanced.
7.5 / 10
Weather Factory's card-driven cosmic horror sim deliberately refuses to explain itself -- a design choice its own creators later softened for its 2023 successor after eight years of Steam reviews split almost exactly along the line between players who find that opacity thrilling and those who find it simply punishing.
7 / 10
A genuinely deep, cozy coffee-shop management sim with a near-spotless review record, backed by a developer shipping updates almost daily since launch — its handful of launch-week bugs are already patched history, leaving a fair pacing critique as the most substantial thing left to say against it.
7.5 / 10
A tight, dark-fantasy dungeon-crawling roguelite where every choice trades short-term power for a rising curse meter — critically well-reviewed and Very Positive on Steam, with a vocal minority who bounce hard off its late-game difficulty and its lack of a Hades-style hub to soften the loop.
7 / 10
A solo-developer's loving, NES-styled cyberpunk ninja platformer published by Yacht Club Games -- Very Positive on Steam for its pixel art and soundtrack, with a specific, years- consistent complaint that its controls and difficulty never quite match the genre touchstones it invites comparison to.
7 / 10
A mazing tower defense that plays like a lost Warcraft 3 custom map brought back with online co-op and a roguelite layer, whose launch-week control complaints and thin tower roster have both been substantially addressed by one of the most active post-launch patch cadences this library has documented.
7.5 / 10
A beloved hybrid of Vampire Survivors, Diablo-style gearing and Hades-style god powers, still in Early Access nearly three years after launch — with even its most loyal fans now openly asking whether it will ever actually finish.
7 / 10
A two-person studio's isometric action-adventure about a soul-collecting crow, nominated for two BAFTAs and named Golden Joystick's Best Indie Game of 2021 -- Very Positive on Steam five years on, with one specific design choice, a total absence of any map, dividing even its fans.
8 / 10
A second-monitor idle game about building a spacefaring trade fleet, launched thin enough that its loudest early reviewers called it a demo with a price tag — and then patched hard enough, with a dedicated endless mode and monthly content drops since, that the complaint driving most of its negative reviews is now largely out of date.
7 / 10
Capcom's confident return to its own franchise after 2013's divisive DmC reboot, splitting combat across three wildly different playable characters -- Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam seven years on at 96% of over 169,000 reviews, with a scattered but real minority complaint about DLC nickel-and-diming, a stale PC port (still no ultrawide or DLSS support), and a story some players find thinner than the combat around it.
8.5 / 10
