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 cute, cheap goblin-blacksmith crafting and resource-management game with a small, genuinely fond following -- and an equally consistent complaint that there simply isn't much of it, with most players finishing in well under an hour.
5 / 10
Harebrained Schemes' pulpy 1930s take on XCOM-style tactics landed Mostly Positive with players, and cost publisher Paradox Interactive a confirmed $22.8 million write-down within a week of release -- a commercial disaster that split the studio from its publisher, ended patch support, and left global achievement data showing only 8.8% of owners ever finish it.
6 / 10
A visually striking Lovecraftian metroidvania about diving into murder victims' dying memories, undercut at launch by clunky controls and poor optimisation the developer never fully resolved before formally announcing, in a farewell post nearly two years later, that support had ended for good.
6 / 10
A full-price stealth-platformer built around Middle-earth's most compelling supporting character that arrived so technically broken it became a byword for launch disasters — its Steam player count hit zero within five months, and the studio that made it closed its development arm weeks after release.
3 / 10
Sabotage Studio's debut turns from an 8-bit Ninja Gaiden throwback into a 16-bit metroidvania halfway through, and that structural gamble is exactly what still divides its Steam reviews eight years later -- critics loved the twist in 2018, but a large share of players now say the backtracking-heavy second half undoes what the first half built.
7.5 / 10
A base-building, Factorio-flavoured action RPG that launched in October 2021 to strong acclaim, then spent nearly four years failing to deliver a promised co-op mode -- and finally did, in August 2025, bundled with a loot rework substantial enough to spark a fresh wave of complaints from the veterans who'd waited for it.
7.5 / 10
A standalone sequel to one of the sharpest deduction games in years, trading its predecessor's ancient-world mystery for a 1970s conspiracy -- slightly less airtight than the original by its own fans' admission, but still one of the best pure puzzle-narrative games released in 2024.
8.5 / 10
A Team17-published fantasy alchemy-adventure about a masked Warden brewing potions and taming creatures to stop a spreading corruption -- genuinely atmospheric and well-loved by a devoted minority, but let down by threadbare tutorials, a locked camera and a developer who shipped two patches in its first two weeks and then largely went quiet.
6 / 10
A Lovecraftian open-world detective game that spent nearly four years yanked off Steam entirely by a publisher lawsuit, then came back in 2024 as a self-published "Remastered" rebuild that swapped out the version some owners specifically wanted to keep -- Mostly Positive today, praised for atmosphere and mythos, criticized for repetitive investigation, weak combat, and a rocky relaunch.
6 / 10
Deck13's sci-fi Souls-like introduced limb-targeting combat and an exosuit-crafting loop genuinely novel for the genre, and spent nine years being described in almost identical terms by its own fans -- a great first few hours undone by clunky combat and a back half that runs out of ideas.
6.5 / 10
A fantasy bullet-hell roguelite with a loop players return to for hundreds and even thousands of hours, running in the same Early Access state for nearly four years -- Steam's own achievement data and the solo developer's own dev-blog admissions both back up the loudest recent complaint, that its major content update keeps slipping.
7.5 / 10
A joke taken to its logical extreme — an idle game with no clicking, no numbers, no currency, nothing to buy, and nothing to do except leave it running and watch a leaderboard rank you against everyone else doing the same thing.
6.5 / 10
The Torchlight series' return from a scrapped free-to-play MMO experiment landed as a slimmer, shallower action RPG than its beloved predecessor — and six years on, its Mixed Steam rating hasn't moved an inch, even as the studio that made it no longer exists.
5.5 / 10
A Bronze Age Total War entry that launched to accusations of being an overpriced Troy reskin — then did something this library rarely gets to report: Creative Assembly publicly apologised, cut the price from $59.99 to $39.99, and issued partial refunds to every existing buyer.
6 / 10
A single-player idle fantasy RPG about climbing an endless tower with an auto-fighting hero, undercut for years by one specific, unresolved launch bug that still locks some players' computers up on startup — and now winding down as its developer moves on to a successor.
6 / 10
A striking black-and-white samurai action game built on Kurosawa-style cinematography -- and a rare case where even the game's own top-voted positive review opens by calling the combat "GOD AWFUL," in a corpus where that complaint appears in three out of every four negative reviews.
5.5 / 10
Frozenbyte's course-correction after Trine 3's disastrous 3D detour, returning to 2.5D co-op puzzle-platforming with three fairytale heroes -- still Very Positive on Steam seven years on, with the series' oldest, most consistent complaint (the combat) as fresh in this year's reviews as it was at launch.
7.5 / 10
Frozenbyte's fifth fantasy co-op puzzle-platformer is, by wide agreement, its most gorgeous entry -- and its most persistently broken in the mode the series is built around. Steam has it at Very Positive, but a third of its English-language negative reviews, spanning three full years, describe co-op desyncs, lost progression and crashes that were never fixed.
7 / 10
A Secret of Mana homage so direct that both its critics and its fans reach for the same comparison unprompted — undercut by a self-inflicted design choice that locks its headline co-op feature behind three hours of solo play, well past Steam's own refund window.
5 / 10
A gleefully anti-capitalist heist roguelike starring gaming's most beloved sentient vegetable, trading the original Turnip Boy's adventure-game pacing for run-based combat that most of the fanbase has made peace with -- and a small, vocal minority hasn't.
7.5 / 10
A charming university-management sim that both its harshest critics and its single most-played fan (over 700 hours) describe using the same word -- a reskin of Two Point Hospital -- disagreeing only on whether that's a compliment.
7 / 10
An audacious collection of 50 complete, fictional 8-bit-era games from the creator of Spelunky, near-universally admired for its craft, with a real and well-articulated minority finding its retro difficulty and near-total lack of guidance a genuine barrier rather than charm.
8.5 / 10
An emotionally resonant underwater narrative adventure about grief and isolation, sold to many buyers expecting a Subnautica-style survival game and undercut for keyboard-and-mouse players by controls the game itself warns you to avoid.
6 / 10
A cheap, finite incremental about piloting a ship from Earth to the edge of the observable universe, with an unusually healthy completion rate to back up its warm reception, let down by a user interface that splits into too many screens as it grows and a back stretch several reviewers say outstays its welcome.
7.5 / 10
