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 cheap, frenetic top-down shooter where a destruction witch demolishes dungeon walls instead of fighting through them, Very Positive on Steam for a tight, satisfying thirty-minute main campaign that unlocks a genuinely addictive Endless Mode -- with a small but specific negative sample flagging balance and localization rough edges around the edges of an otherwise well-loved power fantasy.
7 / 10
A dwarf-themed idle mining sim that spent the better part of two years in Early Access before its July 2024 1.0 launch, built around floor management, cloneable dwarves and a slow climb toward daylight.
6.5 / 10
A maze-building tower defense roguelite that fuses Warcraft 3 custom-map nostalgia with Slay the Spire-style deckbuilding, sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive across 2,486 reviews — but a full read of its negative sample finds the same specific complaint recurring for two straight years, that the concept has outgrown the content built to support it.
7.5 / 10
A visually stunning UE5 adaptation of Bernard Werber's classic novel that nearly every reviewer agrees looks incredible and just as consistently says isn't the ant colony simulation its premise promised — reviewed here alongside a genuinely substantial free content update that answers some, if not all, of that disappointment.
6 / 10
A co-op liminal-space horror game that rode the Backrooms internet craze into Early Access in 2022, spent three years earning a huge audience on atmosphere and jump-scares with friends, and is still being actively patched onto new consoles four years later.
7.5 / 10
A NZ$2.49 idle hero-placement tower defense from solo Chinese developer Yamate whose 30-wave campaign hits the same reproducible, game-breaking bug at wave 23 in two independent reviews a year apart, on top of a broken mana mechanic and unit upgrades that reset every time you quit — a serious flaw in a game built around idling away from the keyboard.
3 / 10
A cheap fantasy-themed clicker from Leakage Games that can be fully completed in a handful of hours, undermined by a genre-breaking design choice — no progress at all while the window isn't in focus.
3 / 10
A first-person shooter where the targets are mushrooms the size of garden sheds, this short, cheerful mashup nails the fantasy its title promises but quietly breaks the genre promise in its own name — every one of its three short levels wipes your numbers back to zero.
6.5 / 10
A zombie-survivors auto-shooter that bolts a permadeath mercenary camp onto the Vampire Survivors formula, then largely stopped receiving new content the year after it left Early Access. The base-building risk-reward loop is genuinely distinct; the 330-achievement grind underneath it is not.
5.5 / 10
A hand-painted, alternate-history JRPG about an alcoholic Slovak knight fighting Hussite raiders and folkloric horrors, beloved almost entirely for its art, music, and sheer strangeness — while its own reviewers, even most of the positive ones, agree the turn-based combat underneath is thin and the three-to-four-hour runtime is a tough sell at its price.
7 / 10
A NZ$5.99 idle RPG that dresses an 11-skill crafting-and-progression system up as a joke about spinning a fidget spinner impossibly fast, from a solo developer who patched constantly through Early Access and then went almost completely silent after the September 2023 1.0 launch.
7 / 10
A stylish hybrid of deck-building and turn-based tactics staged as John Wick-style action- movie fight choreography -- Very Positive on Steam, with a consistent balance and replayability complaint against genre giants like Slay the Spire, and a recent, specific monetisation grievance from its most invested players.
7 / 10
A budget dungeon crawler whose store page promises "endless procedurally generated dungeons," while every reviewer who has actually bought it describes roughly four fixed rooms, a death bug, and no way to quit the game without closing it through Windows.
3 / 10
A free browser idle-skilling MMO that openly plays the RuneScape/Melvor Idle songbook with a shared world bolted on -- competent, fair to free players, and over a year into development by the time its Steam Early Access page makes it look brand new.
6 / 10
A goblin who robs dungeons by night and haggles over the loot by day, split between a genuinely good pixel-art Metroidvania and a shopkeeper sim that keeps overriding it — the game is at its best exactly when it lets you forget the rent is due again in three days.
7 / 10
A dark fantasy colony strategy game steeped in Slavic folklore, praised for its art, voice acting and Darkest Dungeon-style sanity management even by players who can't recommend it. The mechanics underneath rarely earn the same trust, and day-one paid DLC on top of a NZ$61.99 base game became the review corpus's loudest single complaint.
5.5 / 10
A retro-arcade roguelite built around a genuinely clever idea — rotating a shared shield to reposition a four-hero party mid-fight — undercut by a crash problem this review's full read of the review history finds so persistent the developer built a consolation message for it instead of fixing the source.
5.5 / 10
A hardcore open-world tactical extraction shooter with genuine "Ghost Recon meets Tarkov" ambition and a playerbase invested enough to log hundreds of hours each — reviewed here through a persistent, multiply-corroborated PvP cheating problem several reviewers say the developers actively suppress discussion of, alongside two years of genuinely frequent development.
5.5 / 10
A solo-developer, text-only ASCII RPG that closed a disciplined ten-week Early Access run with a genuinely huge 1.0 patch — 328 skills levelled by doing, 190 classes across seven tiers reached through evolve-or-merge choices, and a NZ$7.89 price with no ads, no microtransactions and no sound at all.
7.5 / 10
A NZ$6.29 pixel-art idle-exploration RPG that pairs a genuinely appealing loop — explore fogged tiles, build a town, auto-fight through a side-scrolling combat screen — with balance so broken that its own players report HP-boosting gear leaving them with less HP, and a patch history that stops two days after a January 2022 launch.
3.5 / 10
A genuinely ambitious 50v50 jungle-warfare expansion of the Hell Let Loose formula — tunnels, helicopters, patrol boats and 17 battlefield roles — undercut by a launch several reviewers call "extremely early access," a crossplay aim-assist complaint that dominates the negative reviews, and a NZ$61.99 price competing with cheaper, better-established Vietnam shooters.
5 / 10
A score-attack FPS from the solo creator of cult classic Devil Daggers that a professional game designer called one of the decade's most significant releases — and that the developer's own store page warns can trigger photosensitive seizures.
7 / 10
A cheap idle collector-battler from solo developer okyakusama, built around gathering AI-illustrated banshees and gambling on skill-book rerolls, undercut by thin late-game content and no offline progression at all.
5.5 / 10
A NZ$3.19 idle "tycoon" whose entire loop, according to multiple independent reviewers, is buying one of 36 plots and watching it pay a flat 1 coin regardless of price or level — the fourth Boogygames Studios template Wanderer has reviewed, and the thinnest one yet.
2.5 / 10
