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.
Game Hive's decade-old idle RPG builds its whole second act around clans and scheduled tournaments — a structure that gives its artifact-and-relic progression somewhere real to point, but also turns a genre built for "check back later" into a calendar commitment with a very tall premium-currency ladder sitting next to it.
7 / 10
A Scottish-flavoured Dynasty Warriors crossed with Risk of Rain 2, with genuinely praised combat, art direction and co-op carrying a large, consistent Steam review sample past a stingy meta-progression economy and some rough Early Access edges.
7.5 / 10
A 2011 sandbox that turned "dig, build, fight" into a full RPG and never stopped growing — fifteen years and counting of free updates, still one of the best-value games on Steam.
9.5 / 10
Twelve years and eight chapters after launch, The Elder Scrolls Online still lets you start anywhere and stay relevant everywhere. Level scaling bought that freedom; the trade-off is a levelling arc with no real stakes and a monetisation model dense enough to need a spreadsheet. Reviewed with Season One: Return of the Thieves Guild live.
7.5 / 10
Fifteen years on, Skyrim's open world is still the reason people play it — walk in any direction and something is there. The systems underneath that world, from swordplay to loot to the dialogue tree, have aged a lot less gracefully, and Bethesda has spent a decade finding new ways to resell the same game. Reviewed as Skyrim Special Edition, the version Steam actually sells you today.
8 / 10
The first 3D Zelda didn't just adapt a 2D formula to a new dimension — it solved the problems that new dimension created, and the industry has been using its answers ever since. A retrospective on the N64 original, with a clear steer on which version to actually play today.
9.5 / 10
A tower-defence game, a factory incremental and a scripting sandbox welded into one free island, where the real endgame is writing the AI that plays it for you.
7.5 / 10
Eleven years and one free next-gen overhaul later, CD Projekt Red's open-world epic is still best understood through its side quests rather than its main story — and its combat, inventory and level-gating have aged in ways the writing never did.
9 / 10
A free browser incremental that has been running since 2015 — trap creatures, build a war economy out of them, and watch a soft-reset loop of zones, portals and heliums turn into one of the deepest progression systems the genre has ever built.
7.5 / 10
A free browser incremental that spends its first ten minutes as a joke and its last hour as a genuinely tense endgame, built around a premise everyone already half-knows and a structure that keeps rewriting the rules underneath it.
8.5 / 10
A Viking survival sandbox that gates its whole progression behind biomes, each one resetting your sense of safety from zero. Five and a half years into Early Access, with a firm 1.0 date finally on the calendar, it's worth asking how much of that reputation still holds.
8.5 / 10
Poncle stripped aiming and attacking out of the action-roguelite formula and the result became one of the decade's most copied designs — a review of what actually holds four years later, now that the screen-filling spectacle has become the whole pitch.
9 / 10
A free-to-play space-ninja shooter that has been adding systems since 2013 without ever taking one away. Genuinely one of the most generous live-service games on the market, and one of the hardest to explain to a friend. Reviewed with Jade Shadows: Constellations current.
8 / 10
A turn-based CRPG that hands you a voidship, a dynasty's fortune and the Imperium's blessing to do almost anything with both — built on a career system that turns absurd by the final act, and shipped rough enough at launch that its current, patched shape is a genuinely different game to review.
7.5 / 10
Shiro Games' open-world mercenary RPG treats a company of sellswords as a small business — wages, food, gear repair and prisoners are the real spreadsheet, and combat is what happens when that spreadsheet goes wrong.
8 / 10
A free Android incremental with more content than most paid ones, wrapped in a chest-and-rewarded-video economy that sells you relief from its own busywork. The genre's most argued-about game, and both sides have a point.
7 / 10
A survival MMO that actually earns its licence — stillsuits, spice addiction and sandworms all function as real systems — held back by an endgame that still leans too hard on forced PvP for players who came for the desert, not the fight.
7.5 / 10
A dwarven mining incremental that turns every run into a demolition problem — hire dwarves, point war machines at a mountain, and work out how to get the gold home before the mountain takes it back.
8.5 / 10
Seven people spent twelve years building a handcrafted fantasy RPG where you are nobody special, and it shows in the best and worst ways — superb exploration and a classless build system, wrapped in a technical layer that isn't finished.
7.5 / 10
Seven years after it was announced, Team Cherry's sequel arrives faster, meaner and bigger than the original, and mostly earns every one of those seven years.
9 / 10
A free incremental RPG that hides a genuinely deep skill web behind a calm Pacific Northwest setting — and then puts a price on the one resource an idle game trades in, time away.
8 / 10
A solo developer's four-and-a-half-year Early Access project about running up to eleven characters at once — genuinely one of the deepest class-and-skill webs in the idle genre, sitting behind a shop that has gotten harder to ignore.
7 / 10
A nine-person Shanghai debut builds a hand-drawn action RPG around a parry that can't be spammed, and mostly wins the argument — undone by a text layer that clearly needed another month.
7.5 / 10
A solo developer's take on RuneScape-style skilling, rebuilt as a multiplayer idle game with a real player-driven economy — and a cow theme it commits to with a straight face.
7.5 / 10
