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 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
A gorgeous Edo-period fantasy action RPG with three distinct heroes and fluid combat, whose shallow run variation draws real roguelite complaints -- and whose launch was upended a week in when its publisher abandoned the project, not the small developer some angry reviews initially blamed.
6.5 / 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 deliberately combat-free, chore-and-exploration adventure that sold itself as a Zelda meets Stardew Valley hybrid -- reviewers who took that pitch literally have spent nine years saying the same thing, that the surface is genuinely lovely and almost every system underneath it is thinner than the comparison implies.
6 / 10
A VR-only MMO that launched to real excitement and $35 million in funding, then had its developer cease content work in 2024 and fold what paying customers bought into a free mode -- verified against press coverage, not just the review corpus that says the same thing.
5.5 / 10
An ambitious three-person team's squad-based tactical RPG with real keep-building and army-management ideas, undercut by combat several detailed critics independently call shallow and repetitive, a thin story, and tactical bugs the developer's own "continuously improving" claim didn't hold up against a follow-up review.
5.5 / 10
A free-to-play turn-based ninja RPG whose entire review sample, ten days after launch, is nine reviews and mostly negative — with a PvP-centred design that reviewers say can't currently find opponents to fight.
3.5 / 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 genuinely well-regarded RTS still actively supported five years on, dragged down by a persistent, multi-year complaint that its pace is tuned for competitive players at the expense of casual ones, plus a cluster of fresh 2025-2026 issues — an anti-cheat update that blocked an adaptive controller, a paid mode quietly removed, and a false-positive cheating ban.
7.5 / 10
A tense, genuinely acclaimed stealth-RTS squad tactics game in the Alien universe, undermined by a specific campaign-blocking bug that reviewers report as unfixed from launch in 2023 all the way through 2026, capable of destroying 40-plus hours of progress with no warning.
7 / 10
A Slay the Spire and Into the Breach hybrid deckbuilder whose satisfying core loop has kept some players logging hundreds of hours, held back by real balance complaints about build diversity and a specific, concrete motion-sickness accessibility issue.
7 / 10
A charming, ASMR-quality tidying puzzle game whose satisfying sorting mechanics draw near-universal praise, tempered by a persistent gap between its cozy, freeform marketing and puzzles that often demand one specific solution, plus a real, unaddressed colour-blind accessibility gap.
7.5 / 10
A cozy co-op survival-crafting sandbox about restoring flying islands, actively developed by Funcom's Astrolabe Interactive for a year and a half of Early Access, whose own reviewers document a consistent mid-game slump once the flying-island novelty wears off, alongside real, still-present performance issues and one especially prominent motion-sickness complaint.
6.5 / 10
A charming, expanded sequel to the cult indie roguelike platformer Angvik that keeps its predecessor's build variety and humour while dropping much of its difficulty, leaving several reviewers wishing for a harder mode to match the challenge fans of the first game remember.
6.5 / 10
A visually striking underwater city-builder whose post-apocalyptic survival premise promises real struggle, but whose actual build-research-wait loop draws consistent, specific comparisons to a much easier Anno — pretty to look at, reviewers say, with too little game underneath.
5.5 / 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
A short, gorgeously presented puzzle-adventure built around a genuinely clever core mechanic — shifting entire rows and columns of the world to move yourself — whose puzzles rarely escalate past their opening ideas and whose YA-inflected writing draws consistent criticism even from its own fans.
6.5 / 10
A small co-op action roguelike that grew out of a public alpha and beta into a full release its handful of long-term testers say has transformed since those early builds. Ten reviews, all positive, and a developer shipping patches at a pace that matches the enthusiasm.
7 / 10
A post-apocalyptic 3D colony sim from the team behind RimWorld's Combat Extended mod that launched into Early Access far rougher than its years of hype promised — genuine game-breaking bugs and missing basics, offset by real community goodwill toward developers open about the production troubles that forced an early, underfunded launch.
5.5 / 10
An award-nominated interactive drama whose rotoscope-style presentation and first-half storytelling drew real critical acclaim, undercut by a store description promising a thirty-year saga that ends on an unresolved cliffhanger its developer has said nothing publicly about continuing in more than three years.
6 / 10
A free-to-play incremental action RPG with zero monetisation and a genuinely likeable weapon-and-relic progression system, undercut by a fair, repeated complaint — this "idle" game leans so heavily on active clicking that its passive damage barely matters.
6 / 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
A smaller-scoped "return to form" for the series whose Steam launch was marred by a severe Ubisoft Connect authentication error, but whose more durable complaint is that the game itself feels generic and forgettable relative to the franchise's high points — sentiment has since recovered meaningfully as launch-specific issues faded.
7 / 10
A visually striking, content-packed Viking open-world RPG whose negative sample is dominated by a specific, well-documented complaint — a genuinely 15-20 hour story stretched with repetitive filler into 65-plus hours — compounded by a notorious two-year wait for Steam achievements and crash reports still arriving more than three years after release.
6.5 / 10
