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 solo-developed cozy idle farm sim that most short-session players find genuinely relaxing -- while its handful of longer, more critical reviews describe its headline "8 worlds" feature as cosmetic and the whole thing as thin once the initial charm wears off.
5.5 / 10
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 free Steam idle game about vacuuming dust into oblivion that a large share of its own audience openly calls a copy of Leaf Blower Revolution — and, three-plus years into Early Access, still hasn't shipped the 1.0 its own roadmap once promised for this year.
6 / 10
A gorgeous, story-driven Darkest Dungeon-alike from a four-person South Korean studio, still stuck at a Mixed Steam rating seven years on -- gorgeous art and an unusually generous first-week patch run against a punishing UI, a party-wipe-on-main-character-death rule, and cosmetic unlocks that reviewers consistently call not worth chasing.
5.5 / 10
A steampunk grid-based dungeon crawler built squarely in Legend of Grimrock's shadow, with atmosphere and a Bioshock-flavoured setting that reviewers consistently praise -- and one specific, repeatedly-named design decision, enemy level-scaling, that a large share of its own fans say ruins the back half.
6.5 / 10
A small, charming Kairosoft pixel-art town-management sim with a devoted but tiny Steam following -- reviewed here from a genuinely small sample, honestly disclosed, rather than padded out to look more authoritative than the evidence allows.
6.5 / 10
An ambitious Early Access idle RPG from a studio literally named Idle Gamers -- four classes and twelve subclasses, co-op world bosses, a 24-hour offline cap and no microtransactions -- that a large and often deeply invested review base calls one of the best idle RPGs of the year, set against a genuinely loud minority calling its AI-generated art and UI "AI slop" and its daily balance patches disruptive to builds players had already committed to.
7 / 10
A debut Metroidvania that wears its Salt and Sanctuary and Bloodborne influences openly — critically well-received and Very Positive on Steam for its gothic art and boss fights, held back by confusing itemization, quest-breaking progression traps and a map screen players report as unusably broken years after launch.
7 / 10
An isometric Norse action RPG that split its own audience almost exactly down the middle at launch, and nine years later carries a second, separate complaint that has nothing to do with balance -- the developer stopped supporting it within months, and online co-op has been reported broken for years.
5.5 / 10
A debut game from a small Chinese studio brings authentic wuxia storytelling -- the genre of Jin Yong's martial-arts novels -- to a gorgeous 2D pixel-art RPG, and Steam's audience has responded overwhelmingly. The praise is earned, but a persistent, years-unresolved UI and localisation problem and real pacing complaints keep it short of a flawless recommendation.
7.5 / 10
A grimdark Diablo-like that launched always-online and unfinished in 2017, was widely credited by its own players with turning itself around after a specific 2019 overhaul patch, and didn't drop the always-online requirement that dogged its reputation until a dedicated offline mode arrived nearly seven years later.
6 / 10
A Diablo-shaped co-op loot ARPG set in the Warhammer Fantasy city of Nuln -- Mixed on Steam both at launch and seven years later, with a strikingly consistent complaint across the entire review history: a short, repetitive campaign, shallow build variety, and buggy co-op that a "Diablo clone" comparison never quite escapes.
5 / 10
A character-based co-op action RPG that launched into Early Access on 17 August 2023 to what reviewers called one of the worst MMO launches in gaming history — hour-long server queues, a punitive premium-currency cash shop — then, after its original publisher's games division shut down months later, was rebuilt by its developer into a one-time purchase with microtransactions removed entirely.
7 / 10
A charming, well-liked Vampire Survivors-style roguelite whose marketing promises explicit content it doesn't deliver — and whose main menu has carried a completely non-functional "Extra" button since launch, still unrepaired three years and one bug-fix patch later.
6 / 10
A stick-figure comedy RPG from the Kingdom of Loathing team that landed among 2017's most acclaimed indies -- Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam nine years later -- while carrying a serious, publicly documented allegation against its director that a real share of its own reviews now raise unprompted.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely inventive Monster Hunter rival, launched at a premium price in a state so broken that its own launch-week reviews accused EA of "buy now, patch later" — and, seven months on, EA reportedly considered ending support altogether, a story Steam's own aggregated press coverage keeps returning to years later.
6.5 / 10
A genuinely beautiful nature-themed idle game -- biologist-verified species cards, lush stylised regions -- ported from mobile with its premium-currency shop apparently removed days after launch, though reviewers as recent as 2026 still describe running into one.
5.5 / 10
A gorgeous, Breath of the Wild-indebted survival roguelite about a shipwrecked warrior sailing between procedural islands — praised for its art and boat-building, undercut by a identity crisis between story, survival and permadeath that most players never resolve, since fewer than one in eleven ever finishes it.
5.5 / 10
A remade PC version of KIWIWALKS' beloved mobile witch-training RPG series, drawing genuine "game of the year" praise from longtime fans — alongside a smaller but specific, multiply corroborated concern about how the game frames its magically-aged young protagonist.
7.5 / 10
Contingent99's Kickstarter-funded elemental combo roguelite is Very Positive on Steam eight years on, but the single most consistent complaint in its review history -- getting stunlocked by chains of hits with no invincibility frames on the dash -- is exactly the same complaint it launched with in 2018.
7 / 10
A stylish co-op survival roguelite about wizards who shoot rather than cast, widely described at launch as feeling rushed and early-access-like — and, as of June 2024, permanently frozen in that state after developer Galvanic Games officially disbanded.
6 / 10
A satirical survivors-like about incompetent superheroes causing more damage than the threats they're fighting, backed by an unusually rapid Early Access update cadence — reviewed from a small, currently spotless but geographically narrow sample, with the caveats that honestly deserves.
6.5 / 10
A hand-drawn Slavic-folklore action RPG about a one-handed, cursed blacksmith, still Very Positive on Steam seven years on -- but critics and players have agreed, with striking consistency since launch week, that the art, story and Romanian folk soundtrack are carrying a combat and crafting system that never got fixed.
6.5 / 10
