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 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
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 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 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 mobile gacha game with the gacha surgically removed, rebuilt around a custom protagonist, a town you raise from ash, and a battle system that still rewards knowing exactly when to break something.
8 / 10
Two and a half years after the meme that ate January 2024, Palworld's 1.0 finishes the job — a survival sandbox whose real subject is labour, with 72 more Pals, a level-80 ceiling and two new regions bolted onto the top of it.
8.5 / 10
Obsidian's satirical space RPG grows a genuinely excellent build system and a slow-motion gunfight worth building around, then hands the writing and the companions less attention than either deserved.
8.5 / 10
