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 near-universally beloved web-swinging superhero game whose PC port has carried an unresolved, save-corrupting crash bug since the day it launched — persisting across three years of patches and still blocking full completion for some players.
8 / 10
One person made a NZ$14.75 survivors-like that sold a million copies in a fortnight and sits at 94% across 104,643 reviews — and whose most invested players have been asking for the same balance pass since October 2025.
8 / 10
A free, PS1-textured love letter to World at War and Black Ops 1's original Zombies mode, built by a small team that shipped ten hotfixes in its first five days — including one that directly fixed the exact balance complaint players were posting about at the same time.
8 / 10
A genuine landmark action RPG whose Steam version spent four years as a warning label of its own — a beloved, philosophically ambitious game shipped in a technically broken PC port that Square Enix quietly fixed on a different storefront first.
8.5 / 10
A hand-drawn Taopunk action-platformer that translates Sekiro's deflection combat into 2D with remarkable precision — and asks you to accept that parrying is the only real answer it has.
8.5 / 10
The most complete redemption story in gaming, a decade on. The 2016 launch reviews and the 2026 ones are describing almost different games — and the newest wave of criticism has nothing to do with the old one.
8 / 10
A turn-based RPG that splits its time between a colourful dream world and a grounded, emotionally heavy reality, built around themes of grief and mental health with a level of care that's earned it one of the most devoted followings of any recent indie RPG.
9 / 10
A short, genuinely inventive puzzle adventure that reaches outside the game window to talk to you — 98.3% positive, and if you're on Linux or Steam Deck you should buy a different version of it.
8.5 / 10
Build a machine that makes gold, then spend three hours making it smaller — 97.1% positive, nine years old, and still receiving patches a fortnight ago.
8.5 / 10
A free horror-fantasy visual novel about a messy, thirty-something friend group dragged back into the wish-granting wonderland of their childhood — remastered and re-released this July to a genuinely spotless review record.
8.5 / 10
A time-loop mystery about a tiny solar system that "everyone says" you need to experience knowing nothing about — Overwhelmingly Positive at 95.6%, and honest enough with itself that its own top negative review is a genuinely unresolved crowdfunding controversy, not a design flaw.
9 / 10
A border-checkpoint bureaucracy simulator that turns document-checking into genuine drama, thirteen years on. Its creator says its themes have only become more relevant with time — a fact he finds less like vindication and more like a tragedy.
9 / 10
A puzzle game about pushing boxes into boxes that contain themselves — 99% positive, one of the highest-rated games in this library, with a motion-sickness problem its own longest-playing critic begged the developer to fix.
8.5 / 10
A ragdoll physics sandbox at 98.7% positive with a Workshop full of community mods — and a February 2026 incident where one of those mods spread itself across the Workshop and had to be shut down.
8 / 10
A near-perfect 2009 strategy game sold as a 2009 build, in which the design has aged beautifully and the port has aged badly — and the complaints are getting more common, not less.
8 / 10
Fifteen years on, Portal 2 remains one of the most acclaimed puzzle games ever made — and its small, honest minority of dissent is worth hearing, from real motion-sickness reports to a considered argument that the sequel traded the original's focus for scale.
9.5 / 10
MMO raid mechanics compressed into a 40-minute co-op roguelike, 97.9% positive with a perfect recent record — and a colour-clarity problem that kills players through no fault of their own.
8.5 / 10
An emotionally overwhelming, near-universally acclaimed western epic — undermined for over six straight years by a mandatory launcher that reviewers say can prevent you from playing even the offline single-player campaign, and a 2024 "Labor of Love" award many felt the game's own neglect made absurd.
8 / 10
A masterfully modernized remake of one of gaming's most influential horror games — briefly and seriously undermined in early 2026 by a new anti-piracy DRM that tanked performance on an already three-year-old game, until Capcom reversed it within a month.
8.5 / 10
A gorgeous, genre-blending horror-action sequel to Resident Evil 7 — beloved broadly, but facing a real, consistent identity debate from series fans who miss the tighter, scarier tone that came before it, plus a launch-week DRM performance problem that's echoed the franchise's reputation years later.
8 / 10
A deduction game that hands you a magic pocket watch, sixty deaths, and no other tools — and asks you to work out exactly who died how, in what order, and at whose hand, using nothing but observation and logic.
9 / 10
A turn-based wizard roguelike so uncompromising that its most-earned achievement sits at 24.5% — and whose only real critics are the people who loved the last one.
8 / 10
A co-op drug-empire sim that turned into one of the biggest word-of-mouth hits of the past two years, built almost single-handedly and beloved for exactly the reasons Breaking Bad was — right up until the empire is built and there's nothing left to do with it.
8 / 10
You move to Shenzhen, take a job building circuits, and read a manual you're expected to print out — and the most-upvoted negative review, at 905 votes, recommends it anyway.
8 / 10
