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.
An automation game that skips the usual pretend-programming abstractions and just hands you a Python-shaped scripting language, then asks you to actually write the loops and functions that run your farm. The rare "learn to code" game that works as a game first.
8.5 / 10
A build-crafting incremental about small creatures smashing a rock for wealth, where the usual "number always goes up" comfort is replaced by permanent choices that can genuinely sabotage a run.
8 / 10
Nineteen years old and still the only MMO that treats Tolkien's geography and timeline as a design constraint rather than a skin. Reviewed with Kingdoms of Harad current, asking what that licence discipline actually buys a player in 2026 — and what a new one genuinely has to pay to see it.
7 / 10
A free browser incremental whose entire subject is the prestige mechanic other incrementals treat as scaffolding — thirty-one reset layers stacked on top of each other, and the accidental parent of a modding framework that a very long tail of hobbyist developers have since built their own games on.
7 / 10
A solo developer's follow-up to Magic Archery swaps archery for architecture, building an incremental around growing a single wizard's tower toward a definite, well-earned ending rather than an infinite number-go-up treadmill.
8 / 10
A tactical fantasy RPG where you never actually give a combat order — you write a standing set of instructions for each unit and then watch your army carry them out, which makes it one of the closest things a big-budget console release has come to an automation game.
8 / 10
A solo developer's debut that welds an automated turret to a twin-stick Asteroids clone, then closes the whole arc out in an afternoon — a sharp, cheap hook let down by a mouse-hostile upgrade screen and a progression curve that peaks right as the credits roll.
7 / 10
A survival-crafting game with action-RPG combat and a boss list instead of a tech tree, built around a PvP fantasy that most of its players quietly opt out of. Two years past 1.0, with the studio now calling it content-complete, it's worth being precise about which version of this game you're actually signing up for.
8 / 10
A god-game sandbox where civilizations of humans, orcs, elves and dwarves grow, fight and collapse almost entirely on their own while you throw lightning, plagues and dragons at them. Nearly five years into Steam Early Access, it's still one of the most purely enjoyable toyboxes in PC gaming — as long as you never expected it to have an ending.
8 / 10
Reviewed with Midnight, the eleventh expansion, current and Season 2 landing this month. A look at what a subscriber actually gets in 2026 — the onboarding path, the sub-plus-shop-plus- expansion cost stack, and whether two decades of accumulated systems still add up to a game worth the monthly fee.
7.5 / 10
Kuro Games' answer to Genshin Impact swaps careful elemental chemistry for a faster, parry-driven combo system and a stamina-free traversal kit — and two years of patches have turned a rocky, heavily-criticised launch into one of Steam's best-reviewed live-service action RPGs. The question this review actually answers is what that trade costs you.
7.5 / 10
A Tamagotchi-raising sim welded onto an idle RPG, charming in exactly the way its premise promises and shallow in exactly the way that premise risks — the hero grows on its own, but you rarely get to decide how.
7.5 / 10
HoYoverse's third live-service RPG throws out the open world entirely and bets everything on combat — parries, dodge counters and three-character chain attacks that reward real execution rather than a stat sheet. The review is about whether that trade is worth what the mission structure and the story pacing cost you.
7.5 / 10
A post-apocalyptic colony sim where the city is a physics object first and a spreadsheet second — every beam, platform and tower obeys weight and tension, and the rising and falling tide can take a whole district down with it.
7 / 10
Flyway Games turns a thirty-second countdown into a health bar, a currency and a weapon at once — a review of how far the time-freeze mechanic carries a roguelite built entirely around never letting the clock feel like punishment, and where cluttered onboarding and a softening difficulty curve hold it back.
8 / 10
Timberline Studio's cozy chef sim ties its farming-and-cooking loop directly into a trick-taking deckbuilder — a review of whether feeding your adventurers is a real tactical decision or just a chore standing between you and the next card fight.
8 / 10
A solo-developed idle aquarium game that nails the cozy, screensaver-adjacent fantasy of collecting fish, but leans so hard on one buy-raise-sell loop that its rarest rewards become a months-long grind with nothing else underneath to fall back on.
7 / 10
A dice-based deckbuilding roguelike that swaps Slay the Spire's card hand for a diamond grid of rollable dice, and mostly proves the swap was worth making — though a shorter campaign and some uneven early rewards keep it from the genre's very top tier.
8 / 10
A survival-automation game that makes terraforming the actual win condition instead of a late-game side quest, tying every conveyor belt and machine you build to a planet visibly coming back to life around it.
7.5 / 10
A 20-minute survival roguelite that lets you rebuild your creature from over 125 evolutions every run, wrapped in a living ecosystem where you're just as often the prey as the predator — sharp and addictive early, but the same handful of builds start resurfacing once the novelty wears off.
7 / 10
Read review of Everything is Crab: The Animal Evolution Roguelite
Emeteria's debut turns into a fluid, chain-reacting sphere and reshuffles reality around you, and that idea alone is worth the price. The kicking-things-off-ledges combat underneath it never catches up.
7 / 10
A voxel colony sim that lets you build up and down instead of just sideways — vaulted keeps, buried cellars, and structural stability all become real design problems. Going Medieval left Early Access after nearly five years with a genuine endgame bolted on, and mostly earns it.
8 / 10
Bluehood Games' incremental mining sim nails the first ten hours — hand-mining gives way to smelteries, upgrade trees and a claimable world map of parallel dig sites at a fair one-time price. The prestige layer that's supposed to carry the back half is where players keep hitting a wall.
7.5 / 10
A Plinko-style incremental where every gumball you shoot is a physics object bouncing off gears for cash — a review of whether two hours of one-more-round number-go-up is worth the price of a coffee.
7.5 / 10
