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 lovingly built retro CRPG that fuses Ultima-era pixel art with genuine Lovecraftian horror and tabletop-inspired tactical combat, beloved for a first half that critics call nearly flawless, held to a lower score mostly by a well-documented back-half quality drop and controller support that stayed broken after a real fix attempt.
8 / 10
A well-loved return to WWII stealth-sniping that launched into the single most-upvoted negative review this library has recorded -- over a forced PvP mechanic penalizing single-player progress -- and has spent the years since accumulating a second, ongoing complaint about DLC pricing that now spans 16 separate add-ons.
7 / 10
A sci-fi skating-platformer from Heart Machine, the studio behind Hyper Light Drifter -- Very Positive on Steam and genuinely loved for its movement and art, but shadowed across years of reviews by a consistent verdict that it never quite lives up to the pedigree that sold it.
7 / 10
Sonic's first open-world entry, warmly received for boss fights and writing that reviewers say the series hasn't matched in years -- while a growing, high-vote complaint about Denuvo's always-online requirement has nothing to do with hedgehogs at all.
7 / 10
A self-contained, deliberately non-live-service starfighter combat game that critics loved and EA promised never to expand — a rare, honest $40 purchase undercut for a real share of players by years-unresolved login authentication bugs and a multiplayer population that's shrunk enough to make its own leaver-penalty system actively punishing.
7 / 10
An RPG Maker-built spiritual successor to Ogre Battle and Fire Emblem with genuinely excellent squad-tactics combat -- undercut, by its own fans' repeated admission, by a story its own community tags call "Story Rich" and its own review corpus calls the weakest part of the game.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely excellent Soulslike with combat this library ranks among the best it's reviewed, one of the best-implemented easy modes in the genre, and a back half that a large share of its own fans say buckles into damage-sponge repetition — complicated further by a limited-time exclusive-content controversy, a Denuvo addition over a year after launch, and reports its own development team was restructured following disappointing sales.
7.5 / 10
Sabotage Studio's debut turns from an 8-bit Ninja Gaiden throwback into a 16-bit metroidvania halfway through, and that structural gamble is exactly what still divides its Steam reviews eight years later -- critics loved the twist in 2018, but a large share of players now say the backtracking-heavy second half undoes what the first half built.
7.5 / 10
A base-building, Factorio-flavoured action RPG that launched in October 2021 to strong acclaim, then spent nearly four years failing to deliver a promised co-op mode -- and finally did, in August 2025, bundled with a loot rework substantial enough to spark a fresh wave of complaints from the veterans who'd waited for it.
7.5 / 10
A standalone sequel to one of the sharpest deduction games in years, trading its predecessor's ancient-world mystery for a 1970s conspiracy -- slightly less airtight than the original by its own fans' admission, but still one of the best pure puzzle-narrative games released in 2024.
8.5 / 10
A fantasy bullet-hell roguelite with a loop players return to for hundreds and even thousands of hours, running in the same Early Access state for nearly four years -- Steam's own achievement data and the solo developer's own dev-blog admissions both back up the loudest recent complaint, that its major content update keeps slipping.
7.5 / 10
Frozenbyte's course-correction after Trine 3's disastrous 3D detour, returning to 2.5D co-op puzzle-platforming with three fairytale heroes -- still Very Positive on Steam seven years on, with the series' oldest, most consistent complaint (the combat) as fresh in this year's reviews as it was at launch.
7.5 / 10
Frozenbyte's fifth fantasy co-op puzzle-platformer is, by wide agreement, its most gorgeous entry -- and its most persistently broken in the mode the series is built around. Steam has it at Very Positive, but a third of its English-language negative reviews, spanning three full years, describe co-op desyncs, lost progression and crashes that were never fixed.
7 / 10
A gleefully anti-capitalist heist roguelike starring gaming's most beloved sentient vegetable, trading the original Turnip Boy's adventure-game pacing for run-based combat that most of the fanbase has made peace with -- and a small, vocal minority hasn't.
7.5 / 10
A charming university-management sim that both its harshest critics and its single most-played fan (over 700 hours) describe using the same word -- a reskin of Two Point Hospital -- disagreeing only on whether that's a compliment.
7 / 10
An audacious collection of 50 complete, fictional 8-bit-era games from the creator of Spelunky, near-universally admired for its craft, with a real and well-articulated minority finding its retro difficulty and near-total lack of guidance a genuine barrier rather than charm.
8.5 / 10
A cheap, finite incremental about piloting a ship from Earth to the edge of the observable universe, with an unusually healthy completion rate to back up its warm reception, let down by a user interface that splits into too many screens as it grows and a back stretch several reviewers say outstays its welcome.
7.5 / 10
A wordless puzzle game that tells a person's life story entirely through the boxes they unpack across eight house moves -- BAFTA Game of the Year winner and Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam, with a value complaint so uniform across five years of reviews that even most of its fans raise it unprompted.
8 / 10
A four-person Melbourne studio's stealth-comedy about being a horrible goose became a genuine 2019 cultural phenomenon and a Game of the Year award-sweeper -- seven years on it's still Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam, with the same specific, consistent friction reviewers named at launch: deliberately awkward controls and a very short runtime for the asking price.
8.5 / 10
An ambitious Early Access idle RPG from a studio literally named Idle Gamers -- four classes and twelve subclasses, co-op world bosses, a 24-hour offline cap and no microtransactions -- that a large and often deeply invested review base calls one of the best idle RPGs of the year, set against a genuinely loud minority calling its AI-generated art and UI "AI slop" and its daily balance patches disruptive to builds players had already committed to.
7 / 10
A debut Metroidvania that wears its Salt and Sanctuary and Bloodborne influences openly — critically well-received and Very Positive on Steam for its gothic art and boss fights, held back by confusing itemization, quest-breaking progression traps and a map screen players report as unusably broken years after launch.
7 / 10
A debut game from a small Chinese studio brings authentic wuxia storytelling -- the genre of Jin Yong's martial-arts novels -- to a gorgeous 2D pixel-art RPG, and Steam's audience has responded overwhelmingly. The praise is earned, but a persistent, years-unresolved UI and localisation problem and real pacing complaints keep it short of a flawless recommendation.
7.5 / 10
A character-based co-op action RPG that launched into Early Access on 17 August 2023 to what reviewers called one of the worst MMO launches in gaming history — hour-long server queues, a punitive premium-currency cash shop — then, after its original publisher's games division shut down months later, was rebuilt by its developer into a one-time purchase with microtransactions removed entirely.
7 / 10
A stick-figure comedy RPG from the Kingdom of Loathing team that landed among 2017's most acclaimed indies -- Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam nine years later -- while carrying a serious, publicly documented allegation against its director that a real share of its own reviews now raise unprompted.
7.5 / 10
