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 gorgeous, fan-service-heavy turn-based JRPG that repeatedly draws the same reaction from its own most devoted audience — "I really wanted to like this" — before describing combat so easy it can be won by mashing one button, and pacing padded with backtracking through the same small areas.
6 / 10
A sci-fi looter-shooter RPG that launched in April 2021 to a genuinely disastrous technical rollout, kept a real fanbase playing anyway on the strength of its gunplay, drew fresh backlash over a paid 2022 expansion, and ended with its own sequel cancelled after Square Enix and developer People Can Fly's relationship broke down entirely.
6.5 / 10
A genuinely distinctive four-panel idle RPG about commanding up to eight heroes at once, with real fans logging four-digit hour counts, undercut by a free-to-play model a large share of reviewers call predatory for specifically monetising the ability to idle at all, plus unexplained account bans and an unusual pattern of frequent server connections a smaller cluster finds alarming.
5 / 10
A solo developer's charming Anno-flavoured idle colony builder with a small but genuinely devoted Steam following -- reviewed here from every available English review rather than a sample, given how small that following is.
6.5 / 10
A Lovecraftian idle RPG that spent months as a well-loved free demo before its 12 August 2026 launch -- an auto-battling, town-building, gear-crafting incremental that early buyers call one of the deepest idle games in years, with a real complaint underneath the praise about a stat and customisation system that gets overwhelming fast.
7.5 / 10
A relaxed, satisfying business sim about building a computer hardware empire from a one-room office to a global brand, hooking even its harshest critics for tens of hours before a genuinely broken product-scoring mechanic and a year-plus of development silence catch up with it.
7 / 10
Obsidian's hand-illustrated murder-mystery RPG set in 1500s Bavaria earns comparisons to Disco Elysium and praise from actual medievalists -- and a genuinely substantial minority of its own fans arguing the choices that define it matter far less than the game pretends.
7.5 / 10
A well-made, press-praised fusion of Dorfromantik's calm tile-placing and Tetris's spatial pressure, backed by a developer who delivered every update on its promised free roadmap, let down for a real minority of players by a lack of hook to keep coming back.
6.5 / 10
A one-person-built, Overcooked-inspired restaurant roguelite that sold over 1.5 million copies on the strength of its co-op chaos and permanent between-run progression -- Very Positive at Steam scale, with a consistent, well-documented complaint that its randomised upgrade rolls and multiplayer netcode haven't kept pace with everything else it does well.
7.5 / 10
A witch-run potion shop, a card-based haggling minigame that critics singled out as genuinely clever, and a debt-clock structure so demanding that fewer than one in five players who own it have ever actually paid it off -- an IGF audience-award winner whose charm and its exhausting pace turn out to be the same design decision.
7.5 / 10
Supergiant Games followed Bastion and Transistor with a fantasy exile story told through a three-on-three magical sport, and split its own fanbase in half doing it -- one of its own most quoted reviews calls it "Supergiant's worst game, but their best piece of art."
7.5 / 10
An old-school MMO-flavoured idle RPG about building a raid squad from twenty classic classes, undone by a progression curve both its fans and critics describe as breaking within the first hour, and a total playtime measured in single-digit hours that a May 2025 update didn't meaningfully fix.
5.5 / 10
A gorgeous voxel-art fairytale action RPG, the finale of Cococucumber's Voxel Trilogy, originally launched day-one on Xbox Game Pass in 2023 and now available on Steam as an enhanced "Legendary Edition" with reworked combat and bosses.
7 / 10
A free, charmingly drawn idle RPG whose developer publicly acknowledged a save-corrupting bug two days after launch and then, on the evidence of its own update feed, never actually fixed it — with players still reporting lost progress from the same issue nearly a year later.
3.5 / 10
A Kickstarter-funded tactical RPG that blends turn-based combat, kingdom management and a visual-novel-style social system, praised almost everywhere for its writing and cast -- and dragged down consistently, across nearly a decade of reviews, by crashes, harsh save limitations and RNG that a meaningful share of players call broken rather than merely unlucky.
6.5 / 10
Series creator Ron Gilbert's genuine return to the franchise thirty years on -- warmly received by a wide margin, and reopening the exact argument his own Monkey Island 2 ending started in 1991, with the same specific complaint dominating this game's negative reviews.
7.5 / 10
Brace Yourself Games turns Crypt of the NecroDancer's rhythm-roguelike DNA into a dedicated rhythm game where monsters are the notes -- a genuinely inventive idea that a clear majority love, held back for a real minority by readability problems at high difficulty and a DLC catalogue that now costs several times the base game.
7.5 / 10
A co-op PvE looter-shooter action RPG about squads of "Weavers" raiding hostile rifts for loot -- a Very Positive Early Access opener with a genuinely large review base, undercut for a vocal minority by an always-online requirement that costs solo players their progress on disconnect, and by a studio whose past Web3/NFT branding this review confirms is kept entirely separate from, and not required to play, the actual Steam game.
6.5 / 10
A gorgeous Scandinavian-folklore adventure about grief and redemption from a debut studio of PlayStation veterans — critically Strong and Very Positive on Steam, with a very consistent minority complaint that its puzzle pacing, backtracking and slow, unskippable animations undercut the story it's telling.
7 / 10
The farming-RPG series' first fully 3D entry, loved by a devoted fanbase logging hundreds of hours -- while a wide, well-documented share of reviewers, including many of its own biggest fans, argue the jump to 3D cost the series more than it gained.
6.5 / 10
A stylish "brain punk" action RPG from Bandai Namco with two playable protagonists and genuinely striking presentation -- Very Positive on Steam, though a large share of even its own positive reviews describe a game that runs out of ideas well before the credits, and a cloud-save bug that reviewers say has gone unfixed for years.
7 / 10
A beautiful feudal-Japan village-builder that both its critics and its own defenders keep measuring against Medieval Dynasty — and finding wanting, with clunky combat, broken enemy AI and a grind so pronounced that building a single house can demand its own sub-loop of crafting.
5.5 / 10
A dollar-priced homage to the Flash-era shoot-'em-up Heli Attack, where picking wands and hats to "break the game" is genuinely fun for a few hours before the reviews agree, in striking numbers and across four years, that the meta-progression grinding it down into.
6 / 10
A real-time idle town-builder that deliberately explains almost nothing, and genuinely keeps growing while the game is closed — the rare idle game its own biggest fans call "the anti-idle game," at the cost of a sizeable share of players who never work out what to do.
7 / 10
