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 space-colony simulation where the number that scales isn't a character level — it's the tangle of pipes, wires and thermal gradients you're personally responsible for keeping alive, and the game never once lets physics take a day off.
8.5 / 10
A demon-infested crusade that hands out nine ways to stop being human, wrapped around the most tabletop-faithful, least newcomer-friendly ruleset the CRPG revival has shipped — and a strategic army layer a large share of its own audience wishes it could turn off.
7.5 / 10
Grinding Gear Games' original 2013 action RPG is still running, still free, and still adding a full seasonal league every few months — a genre-defining build sandbox that never bothered making itself easy to learn, now sharing a studio and a wallet with its own sequel.
8.5 / 10
Grinding Gear Games rebuilt combat around commitment and rhythm instead of clear speed, redrew the passive tree and skill-gem system from the ground up, and is still rebuilding the endgame around them nineteen months into Early Access — a genre-defining campaign wrapped around systems that are still visibly under construction.
8 / 10
A free browser incremental where the resource you're actually optimising is your character's lifespan — age through a job and skill web, die at seventy unless you've trained around it, and rebirth into a faster run. Small in scope next to the genre's marathons, and handed to the community as public domain, which explains why it's been forked well over a hundred times.
7 / 10
A 2015 Kongregate clicker that grew into one of the incremental genre's most durable idle RPGs by making its faction choice actually change how you play, not just which number gets bigger.
7.5 / 10
A free bullet-hell MMO that's been asking the same brutal question for fourteen years — how far will you push a character you can never get back — and somehow still gets away with graphics that looked deliberately retro even in 2012.
7.5 / 10
A colony sim that treats the AI storyteller, not the tech tree, as the main system — every skill point your colonists earn is really just raising the stakes for the disaster it's about to send you. Seven years and five expansions after 1.0, the total price of owning everything has become one of the review's own subjects.
9 / 10
A third-person roguelite where every pickup multiplies the last one while a fixed difficulty clock keeps climbing underneath you — number-go-up design wearing a shooter's clothes. Reviewed against the game's full history, including the DLC launch Gearbox itself admitted put the PC version "in a really bad place," and the year it took to fix.
8 / 10
Jagex's other MMO — the modernised main game running alongside Old School RuneScape on the same account — trades 2007's frozen ruleset for ability combat, twenty-nine skills and a microtransaction history it spent 2026 trying to walk back.
7.5 / 10
An automation game solved in three dimensions instead of two, where every belt run is something you physically walked and every ratio problem is also an architecture problem. Five years after leaving Epic exclusivity, its 1.0 release confirms it was worth the wait.
9 / 10
A decade in Early Access ends with Drilling Thunder, a genuinely substantial 1.0 update that finally gives Scrap Mechanic's celebrated building physics a full story campaign — while leaving the host-dependent multiplayer that has bugged players since 2016 exactly as it was.
8 / 10
Sabotage Studio's turn-based RPG borrows Chrono Trigger's parts openly and reassembles them well — timed hits, a lock-breaking combat layer and a day/night mechanic that actually changes puzzles — but the writing never catches up to the systems around it.
8.5 / 10
FromSoftware throws out the build variety and co-op that define its other games and replaces them with a single unbreakable rule — get better at deflecting, or don't get past this boss — and turns that gamble into one of the sharpest action games ever made.
9 / 10
A pure factory-automation puzzle stripped of combat, scarcity and even failure, where the only opponent is a shape's own geometry. The tightest version of this genre's core loop yet built, and a useful test of what's left once every source of friction is removed.
8 / 10
A gas station job simulator where the real task is deciding, customer by customer, who's human — and living with what happens when you get it wrong in either direction.
8.5 / 10
A tower defense game that treats its orc horde as a fluid rather than a queue of sprites, wrapped in a tight play-lose-upgrade loop that runs out of levels well before it runs out of ideas.
7 / 10
The game that invented the deckbuilding roguelike as a genre in its own right, still sitting at 97% positive on Steam seven years on, and still worth the asking price even with a sequel already in Early Access.
9 / 10
Mega Crit's sequel to one of the most acclaimed deckbuilders ever made adds co-op, two new classes and a rebuilt Ascension ladder, then spends its first five months in Early Access getting hammered by its own veteran players over balance whiplash, a boss nobody could agree on, and a genuine RNG bug a fan had to prove existed.
7 / 10
A free auto-battling dungeon crawler that lets you script your party's behaviour instead of just watching it fight, undercut on desktop by menus that never stopped feeling like a phone app and a save file that a bad crash can wipe outright.
7 / 10
A small Paris studio built a turn-based CRPG on Dungeons & Dragons' free 5.1 rules document rather than a paid brand license, and the result plays closer to an actual tabletop session than any of its bigger-budget rivals — verticality, light and darkness included — while looking and sounding like exactly the smaller production it is.
8 / 10
A potato-powered clicker that spends its idle timers on story instead of retention, and then does the one thing almost nothing in the genre does — it actually finishes.
8 / 10
A decade on, the thing that still makes Stardew Valley work isn't the farm, it's the clock — energy, daylight and a hard seasonal deadline turned into the best progression pressure the genre has ever built, even if the pressure quietly switches off once you're rich.
9 / 10
A first-person open-world RPG built openly in the shape of Skyrim, but set in a bleaker, more literary Arthurian world where night itself turns hostile — ambitious, well-written and visibly under-budgeted in the faces of the people telling its story.
7.5 / 10
