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.
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 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 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
A solo developer's first-person melee roguelike spent two and a half years in Early Access before its 1.0 finally gave the combat a story worth finishing and a boss worth building toward.
8 / 10
A top-down sandbox RPG that spent six years in Early Access building the one system that actually separates it from the Terraria-likes around it — recruit settlers, hand them jobs, and your colony keeps working while you're off fighting something in a cave.
8 / 10
A three-to-four-hour premium incremental about harvesting nodes and defending against waves of invaders, built with a hard ending instead of an infinite number-go-up treadmill — and popular enough to spawn an entire micro-genre of imitators.
8 / 10
A non-idle incremental where every resource tick comes from casting spell combos yourself rather than watching a timer, built around a genuinely novel glyph-alchemy system for crafting your own spells from scratch.
8 / 10
Twelve years into Early Access, the isometric zombie survival sandbox just shipped its biggest update ever and got multiplayer back. The skill grind is still the best in the genre; the menus are still the reason half the people who buy it never see it.
8.3 / 10
An incremental mining game that turns "swing the pickaxe" into a real progression system — eight hand-designed layers, a 150-node permanent skill tree, and a four-hour runtime that ends before the loop wears out its welcome.
8 / 10
Cup Dog Games' debut strips the Soulslike down to nothing but boss fights, built around a Focus-and-Mark system that turns every encounter into a duel over who blinks first — and then asks its best players to do the whole thing again without getting hit once.
8 / 10
A tile-by-tile spaceship colony sim where you build the hull, route the gas pipes, and keep a crew of civilians fed, breathing, and sane while you search a procedural galaxy for a new home. Reached 1.0 in May 2026 after six years in Early Access.
8 / 10
Poncle and Nosebleed Interactive take the cast of a bullet-heaven phenomenon and lock them into turn-based card combat instead. The pivot works far better than it has any right to, right up until the deck-breaking builds that make the genre fun also make the back half of a run trivial.
8 / 10
Read review of Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors
A minimalist text-based incremental that spends its first act pretending to be nothing at all, then quietly reveals it was building a survival story out of firewood, huts and silence the whole time.
8 / 10
The free browser incremental that codified the modern reset ladder — dimensions into Infinity into Eternity into Reality — and is still the game every other prestige-layer idler is quietly measured against.
9 / 10
LocalThunk's solo-developed poker roguelike turns chips times multiplier into the whole game — a review of how far that one exponential idea carries a run, and where the luck, the repetition and the small-screen text start to push back.
9 / 10
Three years and eight patches after launch, Larian's D&D epic is still the reference point for what "your choices matter" is supposed to mean — and its two real weaknesses, a lopsided third act and a ruleset that rewards system mastery over roleplay, haven't gone anywhere either.
9.5 / 10
A hacking-themed incremental where the automation you'd normally unlock with currency is automation you write yourself, in real JavaScript against a real API — free, open source, and still getting rewritten out from under its own players five years after launch.
8.5 / 10
Game Science builds an entire action RPG around the Destined One's staff and the Great Sage's shapeshifting, and lands one of the best boss rosters in the genre — inside a chapter structure that looks far more open than it actually plays.
8.5 / 10
Blobfish's one-person arena shooter hands a potato six weapon slots and lets stat stacking do the rest — a review of how far chips-in-the-shop decision-making carries a twenty-wave run, and where the plain presentation and a few solved builds hold it back.
8 / 10
A free time-travel Sokoban puzzler that gets one specific, difficult idea exactly right — solving a puzzle by recording your own past actions and then working alongside the ghost of what you just did.
8.5 / 10
A turn-based RPG that makes you dodge and parry every enemy attack in real time, wrapped around a hand-painted Belle Époque France that's dying on a one-year clock — and one of the rare acclaimed games that earns the noise made about it.
9.5 / 10
The game that accidentally invented the incremental genre in an evening, still actively updated thirteen years later — and still the yardstick every idle game gets measured against, for better and for worse.
8 / 10
A mining sandbox that turns "just one more tile" into a genuinely well-paced RPG — skills level as you use them, bosses gate the map instead of a level counter, and up to eight players can dig through it together.
8.5 / 10
A roguelite dungeon crawler and a cult-management sim share one save file, and the question that actually matters almost four years on is whether they're still lending each other strength or just taking turns.
8 / 10
