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 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
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 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
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
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 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
A genuinely inventive language-deciphering puzzle game, Overwhelmingly Positive and stable, whose beloved core hook is consistently diluted by stealth sections players compare unfavourably to the calm puzzle-solving around them — plus a real EULA controversy that Focus Entertainment has since publicly clarified and amended.
8 / 10
A wordless puzzle-adventure from LIMBO and INSIDE's lead designer, built around a genuinely inventive world-within-world mechanic that Steam's own reviewers rate Very Positive and trending upward, with a real minority arguing the puzzles are too heavily guided and the boss fights undercut everything the rest of the game does well.
8 / 10
A visually spectacular sequel to a beloved mobile-turned-PC crafting RPG that Butterscotch Shenanigans has supported with an unusually relentless year of updates, held back at launch by mobile-first controls and a text-heavy script that its own most detailed critics — many of them the original's biggest fans — argue buried the sequel's real improvements.
8 / 10
The first and, still, only video game built on Pathfinder Second Edition's actual rules, praised near-unanimously by tabletop fans for its combat fidelity and let down mainly by a short base campaign gated behind paid story DLC and writing that can't match its mechanical accuracy.
8 / 10
A style-obsessed hack-and-slash action RPG from the creator of the cult favourite Lucah, earning near-unanimous acclaim for its combat design and unmistakable queer, gothic identity, with its only real friction coming from fans of its predecessor debating how much of that game's raw emotional edge survived the transition.
8.5 / 10
One of the most acclaimed shooters of its generation, still Overwhelmingly Positive a decade on with recent sentiment running even stronger than its already-elite lifetime score — its few substantive complaints are a matter of taste (some find the campaign repetitive) and a largely historical, patched save-wiping bug from launch week, not anything currently live.
9 / 10
A visually spectacular, mechanically excellent shooter that reshaped its predecessor's combat into a more demanding resource-management loop some veterans call a chore rather than an improvement — and whose negative sample still carries two well-documented controversies years later: a 2020 kernel-level anti-cheat scandal (since removed) and an ongoing protest over id Software's treatment of composer Mick Gordon.
8.5 / 10
A fishing-and-exploration horror hybrid that reviewers rate Overwhelmingly Positive and keep recommending anyway, even while its single loudest, most consistent critique — a spectacular opening that the game never quite develops — shows up inside a striking share of its own five-star reviews.
8 / 10
A seven-years-in-development sequel to a beloved Sonic-inspired indie platformer, whose refined movement and combat draw near-universal acclaim even from disappointed fans, while a smaller but detailed minority documents real bugs, readability issues and a story several call bloated compared to the tighter original.
8 / 10
A ground-up remake of Spiderweb Software's 2003 cult classic open-world CRPG, rebuilding its mutant-crafting and faction politics for modern systems with Kickstarter-backed new content, earning near-universal acclaim tempered only by longtime fans mourning a handful of specific systems the remake simplified away.
8.5 / 10
A stylish cyberpunk first-person parkour game built around instant one-hit deaths on both sides — reviewers on both sides of the score agree the movement and combat feel incredible when mastered, but a genuine, decade-consistent complaint about brutal, trial-and-error difficulty recurs in every year sampled, corroborated directly by achievement completion data.
8 / 10
A comedic, Battle Brothers-inspired turn-based tactical RPG about a disposable band of goblin mercenaries, whose whimsical humour and genuinely deep systemic strategy have earned it a small but extraordinarily devoted following, including players logging well over a thousand hours.
8 / 10
Widely regarded as one of the finest CRPGs ever made — the game reviewers cite as the benchmark even when discussing other Piranha Bytes titles — now facing a genuine, independently verified controversy: a January 2025 price hike that doubled the cost of the entire Gothic catalogue on Steam, timed near the Gothic 1 Remake's announcement, which drove the sharpest spike in negative reviews this classic has ever seen.
8.5 / 10
A widely loved open-world action RPG about hunting robotic beasts in a fallen future — whose PC negative sample carries three distinct, well-documented controversies: a 2020 launch plagued by crashes, a fiercely objected-to data-collection agreement with no real opt-out, and a 2024 delisting tied to a PSN account requirement that blocked some regions from buying either version.
8 / 10
A spatial-puzzle spin on the Luck be a Landlord school of score-attack roguelikes — pack alien cargo into an ever-expanding grid instead of spinning a slot machine — that has, at the time of this review, not received a single negative English-language Steam review out of 100, and reads like it, largely because it gives players real tools to hunt for the build they want instead of just piling on more randomness.
8.5 / 10
