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 remade PC version of KIWIWALKS' beloved mobile witch-training RPG series, drawing genuine "game of the year" praise from longtime fans — alongside a smaller but specific, multiply corroborated concern about how the game frames its magically-aged young protagonist.
7.5 / 10
Contingent99's Kickstarter-funded elemental combo roguelite is Very Positive on Steam eight years on, but the single most consistent complaint in its review history -- getting stunlocked by chains of hits with no invincibility frames on the dash -- is exactly the same complaint it launched with in 2018.
7 / 10
A long-running brawler franchise's biggest gamble in years — swapping real-time combat for a turn-based JRPG system — paid off with the series' best critical reception yet, though a vocal minority of longtime fans still argue the new combat never matched the writing around it.
8 / 10
Villa Gorilla's pinball-metroidvania hybrid won a BAFTA for Best Debut and sits at Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam eight years on -- a genuinely inventive idea that a small but consistent minority of players say the traversal design never quite lives up to, in a game its one-off studio never got the chance, or perhaps never wanted, to follow up.
8 / 10
A solo-developed open-world action-adventure RPG stuffed with hand-written dialogue and reality-bending secrets, drawing genuinely rare "hidden gem" praise from reviewers who describe it as what Undertale could have been if Undertale had been more fun to actually play, held back only by simple combat and a navigation system some players find genuinely disorienting.
8 / 10
A genuinely well-regarded RTS still actively supported five years on, dragged down by a persistent, multi-year complaint that its pace is tuned for competitive players at the expense of casual ones, plus a cluster of fresh 2025-2026 issues — an anti-cheat update that blocked an adaptive controller, a paid mode quietly removed, and a false-positive cheating ban.
7.5 / 10
A tense, genuinely acclaimed stealth-RTS squad tactics game in the Alien universe, undermined by a specific campaign-blocking bug that reviewers report as unfixed from launch in 2023 all the way through 2026, capable of destroying 40-plus hours of progress with no warning.
7 / 10
A Slay the Spire and Into the Breach hybrid deckbuilder whose satisfying core loop has kept some players logging hundreds of hours, held back by real balance complaints about build diversity and a specific, concrete motion-sickness accessibility issue.
7 / 10
A charming, ASMR-quality tidying puzzle game whose satisfying sorting mechanics draw near-universal praise, tempered by a persistent gap between its cozy, freeform marketing and puzzles that often demand one specific solution, plus a real, unaddressed colour-blind accessibility gap.
7.5 / 10
A Mesoamerican fantasy RPG that fuses turn-based planning with real-time execution across three interlocking revenge stories, built around a guilt mechanic that manifests literally as ghosts hounding you in battle — critically adored by almost everyone who played it, and a commercial underdog its own fans openly wish had found a bigger audience.
8 / 10
A small co-op action roguelike that grew out of a public alpha and beta into a full release its handful of long-term testers say has transformed since those early builds. Ten reviews, all positive, and a developer shipping patches at a pace that matches the enthusiasm.
7 / 10
An Overwhelmingly Positive Indonesian-set coming-of-age adventure whose pixel art and emotionally resonant story draw near-universal praise, dragged down by a specific, widely repeated complaint that fetch quests and backtracking bloat what could be a much tighter experience.
8 / 10
A smaller-scoped "return to form" for the series whose Steam launch was marred by a severe Ubisoft Connect authentication error, but whose more durable complaint is that the game itself feels generic and forgettable relative to the franchise's high points — sentiment has since recovered meaningfully as launch-specific issues faded.
7 / 10
A Hades-and-Dead-Cells-flavoured roguelite metroidvania whose art, combat feel and hub writing draw strong praise for its opening hours, with a consistent, specific counter-argument that its meta-progression grows passive rather than build-defining once the difficulty ramps up.
7.5 / 10
A "Soviet BioShock" action RPG whose art direction and alternate-history setting draw close to universal praise, wrapped around combat and pacing reviewers describe as repetitive, a divisive talking-glove companion, and a real, documented controversy over its Russian developer's funding ties that this review reports rather than adjudicates.
7 / 10
The foundational CRPG that gave Baldur's Gate 3 its name, still Very Positive and broadly beloved a quarter-century later — undercut by a genuinely disastrous April 2016 patch that broke the UI and multiplayer, and an unforgiving, famously brutal opening stretch this review verified with hard data rather than reviewer exaggeration.
8 / 10
A story-driven action RPG from DON'T NOD where an emotionally rich central relationship and genuinely difficult moral choices are widely praised, while the open world built to hold them draws a remarkably consistent complaint from its own most invested players — it's simply too big for the game inside it.
7 / 10
A gorgeously illustrated storybook mystery whose "charm" branching mechanic promises narrative agency that a large, detailed share of its own reviewers say never really arrives, funnelling every path toward one true ending while the story runs noticeably long after its central mystery resolves.
7.5 / 10
A dice-driven, one-sitting narrative RPG from the creator of the surreal Off-Peak series, whose replayable, tabletop-flavoured storytelling wins over nearly everyone except a small, vocal group of longtime fans who specifically miss the studio's earlier first-person exploration format.
8 / 10
MercurySteam's dark fantasy forging-adventure spent a year as a PlayStation and Epic Games Store exclusive before reaching Steam alongside a substantial Version 2.0 update. Its combat divides reviewers sharply, and one escort-quest section is disliked with rare unanimity.
7 / 10
A competent, well-liked dark-fantasy metroidvania sequel whose own fans argue it's a step down from the original in atmosphere and platforming, undercut further by a game-corrupting boss softlock that reviewers report as unfixed years after a patch was supposed to address it.
7 / 10
A RuneScape-inspired idle RPG that spent nearly two years in Early Access before its 1.0 launch in June 2026. It nails the AFK-grinding feeling its whole design is built around, but a capped offline system and a new Challenges layer added at launch have split even its most devoted players over whether it's still the idle game they signed up for.
7 / 10
A Persona-inspired turn-based JRPG set in a 1960s American town, whose stunning pixel art and ambitious mashup of social sim and monster-taming combat draw real love, held back by combat accuracy problems and a save system its own developers admitted needed fixing at launch.
7 / 10
A Nordic dark-fairytale adventure whose art, music and folklore draw close to unanimous praise — repeated inside its own top positive review, which admits to hand cramps from "tedious" trial-and-error platforming — while Steam's own data shows nearly half of buyers still see it through to the end.
7.5 / 10
