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 six-person Korean studio's XCOM-meets-Final-Fantasy-Tactics SRPG that has quietly built one of the most devoted fanbases in the genre — thousands of hours logged by individual reviewers, a mastery system deep enough to write wikis about, and a developer who reportedly replies to nearly every single Steam review personally, all wrapped around a translation reviewers compare unfavourably to the internet's most infamous mistranslation meme.
7.5 / 10
A horse-girl training sim whose warm writing and addictive racing loop won it Best Mobile Game at the 2025 Game Awards, sitting alongside one of the harsher gacha economies its own players have documented in detail — no pity carrying between banners, no guaranteed top-rarity pull even at the pity ceiling — plus a real, dated controversy wave over the developer's January 2026 announcement of a dedicated generative-AI studio.
7 / 10
A free-to-play survival MMORPG whose zombie-apocalypse crafting loop has a genuine, deeply invested fanbase, undercut by a barely-adapted mobile interface and a monetisation structure reviewers document in granular, specific detail — including a viral account of a single player spending over $2,000.
5 / 10
A visual-novel-first tactical RPG that opens a respected trilogy, where reviewers overwhelmingly praise the emotional storytelling and world-building and just as consistently admit the tactical battles are the least interesting part of the package.
7 / 10
DONTNOD's narrative vampire-RPG draws real praise for its moral choice system and atmospheric London setting, undercut by a genuinely clunky combat system that's the single most common complaint in this outlet's sample, and a deliberate "commit to your choices" single-save design that several reviewers describe compounding real bugs into permanent, un-fixable stuck states.
6.5 / 10
A free browser-turned-Steam idle MMORPG whose day-one launch put brand-new players into the same PvP world as six-month veterans past level 4,000 — fixed within 24 hours by a fast, transparent developer response, but sitting alongside monetisation and design complaints that haven't gone away since.
4 / 10
A deeply personal, one-to-two-hour narrative cooking game about a Tamil family immigrating to Canada, whose story draws exceptional, culturally specific praise even from critics who otherwise dock it hard for a runtime and cooking mechanic reviewers consistently argue don't match its original asking price.
7.5 / 10
A minimalist top-down Souls-like that strips the genre down to timed dodges, stamina management and hard-won shortcuts, earning near-universal praise for its distillation of the formula while a real minority of even its own fans admit the moment-to-moment feel never quite clicked for them.
8 / 10
A narrative "cozy" tea-shop game from The Stanley Parable creator's studio that deliberately refuses catharsis in favour of sitting with discomfort — a design choice its own highest-voted review frames precisely as "this is therapy, not catharsis," which a substantial minority of players found genuinely frustrating rather than illuminating, especially a mechanic that wipes everything a player has built at the end of every act.
8 / 10
A janky, PS2-throwback sword-and-gunplay action game that split opinion at launch and has just weathered a fresh, verified controversy of its own — a retroactive, initially undisclosed swap to AI-adjusted store page art that the developer has since publicly disclosed and clarified doesn't touch the actual game.
5.5 / 10
A tactical turn-based roguelite that fuses combat with rhythm-game input timing, where debuffs literally complicate your button presses — a genuinely novel hook reviewers praise strongly, wrapped around a progression and balance layer several of the same reviewers find shallower than the concept deserves.
7 / 10
A charming, adorable-looking spiritual successor to Advance Wars whose dominant, stable complaint across every year since launch is a direct, unfavourable comparison to that very franchise — reviewers who came looking for Advance Wars' tactical depth consistently describe Wargroove's combat and unit variety as shallow by comparison.
6.5 / 10
Reviewed the same day as its predecessor, this sequel draws a genuinely different complaint than the original — rather than being measured against Advance Wars for tactical depth, Wargroove 2's dominant criticism is excessive, often unskippable dialogue and exposition, alongside a specific features trade several longtime fans see as a net loss.
6 / 10
A retro pixel-art shooter whose sound design and lore fidelity draw ecstatic praise, set against a specific, achievement-verified finding — echoed by the game's own top-voted review — that only around one in ten buyers ever finishes it, corroborating a real structural complaint about locked-arena repetition and mapless backtracking.
7 / 10
A well-regarded XCOM-style tactics game reviewers repeatedly compare favourably to the genre's best, undercut by punishing difficulty spikes around its wound-recovery system, a recurring Denuvo DRM complaint present since a 2022 launch, and a turn-ending freeze bug one 2026 reviewer describes as still unresolved years later.
7.5 / 10
Four-player co-op combat reviewers on both sides call some of the best in the genre, weighed down by a genuinely notorious launch — a fully functional cosmetic cash shop shipped alongside missing promised systems — and an ongoing pattern of unfulfilled roadmap promises, even as recent sentiment has recovered dramatically since 2022.
7.5 / 10
A turn-based mercenary tactics game that launched to genuine XCOM-starved enthusiasm and a rough, bug-heavy 1.0 — plus a specific, repeated allegation from multiple reviewers that it's a rebrand of an earlier, since-delisted game, which independent research on Steam's own listings substantially corroborates.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed WWII hex-tactics game built for fast, objective-capture skirmishes rather than slow attrition, entering Early Access six days old with a working single-player campaign, online PvP and a map editor already in place — and next to no reviews yet to judge any of it by.
6 / 10
A fast-paced Advance Wars-style tactics game that launched with promised features missing and a genuinely broken economy system, provoking real backer anger — followed by an unusually sustained year of active patching that has narrowed, without fully closing, the gap between what was promised and what shipped.
6 / 10
A fantasy hero-collector that grafts real tower-defense strategy onto the gacha RPG formula, praised for genuinely spectacular presentation and a free-to-play track reviewers call unusually generous for the genre, while gacha odds stay undisclosed and top-tier purchases climb to NZ$160-plus a pop.
6.5 / 10
An isometric immersive sim from Dishonored and Prey veterans that delivers on emergent, reactive storytelling almost every reviewer singles out for praise, wrapped around combat, companion AI and interface decisions that a large and articulate share of its own players call the weakest part of the experience.
7 / 10
A densely written, well-regarded text-based RPG set in the World of Darkness, praised by its own fanbase as the strongest Choice of Games entry yet, undercut by a near-total absence of a save system, day-one paid DLC gating two playable tribes, and a tonal choice that splits its review base sharply.
6.5 / 10
Read review of Werewolf: The Apocalypse — The Book of Hungry Names
A genuinely inventive climbing-horror roguelike in Early Access that earned an Overwhelmingly Positive badge across a massive review base, whose own biggest, most consistent complaint is that it "does not respect the player's time" — permadeath resets progress through well-tuned early content, and reviewers say newer biomes added since launch haven't been tuned as carefully as the original two.
7.5 / 10
A creature-collecting twist on the Vampire Survivors-style bullet-heaven that spent seven months in Early Access absorbing genuinely substantial content updates before reaching 1.0 — most of its harshest criticism predates that work and describes a build that no longer exists, though a real, smaller cluster of post-1.0 complaints, including one raised inside a positive review, says its opening 30 minutes still aren't fixed.
7 / 10
