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 free desktop-corner idle game whose entire pitch is progress that keeps running "alongside your daily tasks" — undercut by a cluster of matching player reports that it stops ticking the moment its window isn't the one on top.
4.5 / 10
A solo-developed factory-and-idle hybrid that grafts a miniature Factorio-style belt economy onto a prestige loop, released in July 2023 with roughly five stated hours of content and an open-source codebase.
6 / 10
A solo-developed Early Access idler about clicking your way from dirt and sticks to iron tools and beyond, sold with a self-aware "brutal grinder" pitch that mostly delivers -- but comes with a rough spreadsheet-style interface and a save wipe waiting at the 1.0 finish line.
7 / 10
A NZ$6.29 xianxia-themed idle herb farm from a Chinese solo developer who shipped a near-identical idle game five weeks earlier — a decorative thousand-card compendium and an auto-battling cultivator sit on top of a loop with exactly one real decision, and both patches and the developer's attention stopped inside the first week.
3 / 10
A free-to-play mobile idle tavern-and-hero-management game ported to Steam in June 2023, whose ad-watch buttons routinely fail to load on PC and whose only post-launch fix, by the reviews' own account, arrived within its first two weeks.
4 / 10
A Chinese xianxia-cultivation idle RPG with real depth — companions, secondary crafting professions, forty-plus realm tiers — undercut by a Simplified-Chinese-only interface, a launch window of patches that stopped in March 2024, and even native-speaking reviewers asking for basic feedback the game never gives them.
6 / 10
A free-to-play idle RPG about farming, fishing and fighting for scrap, released by solo developer blevsoft in December 2023 and left without a content update since January 2024.
5 / 10
A free-to-play sci-fi idler in ongoing Early Access since October 2023, built as an authorised spiritual successor to Idle Space Raider and Transport Defender, undercut by a prestige loop that pays out less on every reset and a store-page offline-progress promise several reviewers say doesn't hold up.
5 / 10
A cheap, unabashedly Legend of Mir-flavoured idle RPG from solo Chinese developer okyakusama, built around a three-class autobattling party, an enormous rebirth ladder, and a near-total absence of real-money spending.
6 / 10
A free solo-developer idle sim about running a weapon shop, prestiging into a town, and sending adventurers out to die for profit — a genuinely distinctive premise undercut by a near-total absence of tutorial explanation and two separate multi-month stretches where updates simply stopped.
5 / 10
A NZ$1.59 zombie-themed idle clicker with a defined 50-level endpoint, a prestige system added by later patches, and a review corpus that's split between genuine affection for its low-poly charm and recognition that it's one of at least four near-identical releases from the same developer in 2022.
4 / 10
An idol-management sim whose own title and store copy promise true idle progression, but whose review corpus — in English and Japanese alike, from critics and fans — agrees on one thing first: it isn't actually an idle game, it's a tight 15-to-20-minute time-management score-attack with no carryover between runs.
5.5 / 10
A solo developer's earnest first Steam game — a calm, click-to-fish incremental loop that early buyers call meditative and addictive — undercut by launch bugs (an aim circle that outgrows the screen, garbled talent-tree text) and a hard stop once the short talent tree is finished, with no ascension or replay option to follow it.
5.5 / 10
A NZ$10.49 stationary-defense aim trainer from solo developer Cosmos, 100% positive across a tiny 14-review corpus and backed by well over a year of frequent, numbered patches through to a deliberate "Final Update" in October 2023 — a well-crafted niche game undersold by a store description that claims movement-based combat its own reviewers say doesn't exist.
6.5 / 10
A narrative-driven tactical RPG about an insurance adjuster who has to deny a claim and save the world, mixing Fire Emblem-style grid combat with a fully voiced dating-sim layer and a time-management system some players find liberating and others find punishing.
8 / 10
A NZ$2.99 satire of Steam's own trading-card economy, where bots buy, sell and craft cards into badges to push a level counter upward — a clever premise that Steam's tiny, Mixed-rated review corpus says never grows past its opening idea.
4 / 10
A six-month side story that began life as DLC for Infinite Wealth and still plays like one in places, following Kazuma Kiryu through his faked-death years under the alias Joryu. The brawling and the finale land; the padding in between and a price tag built for a longer game are the recurring complaints from its own audience.
7.5 / 10
Read review of Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name
A cheap pixel-art idle item-stacker whose Early Access launch was marked by a level-scaling bug that independent reviewers in four different languages describe breaking their save, and a developer who reportedly responded to critics with a public video rather than a patch.
4.5 / 10
A co-op sky-sailing survival sandbox from Bossa Studios -- spiritual successor to their abandoned MMO Worlds Adrift -- that pairs a genuinely loved grapple-and-shipbuilding core with a rushed five-month Early Access run, a save-corrupting bug streak that outlived the 1.0 launch, and a development pace that stalled for the better part of a year before recent fixes started landing.
5.5 / 10
A WWII-flavoured, zero-gravity spin on Escape from Tarkov that launched with real promise in 2022, then spent four years wearing down that goodwill through persistent cheating, contested bans, and — as of an April 2026 developer post apologising for "the silence" — a 20-month content drought.
5 / 10
A JRPG-flavoured roguelite auto-battler that pairs 3D diorama backdrops with pixel-art units and trait-based synergies, landing strong small-scale reviews for its combos even as players compare its interface unfavourably to the genre's biggest name.
7.5 / 10
A yandere-dating-sim premise that flips into psychological horror within its first minutes, and one of 2024's biggest indie viral hits — reviewed here with a specific, verifiable colorblind-accessibility gate its own community flagged, and a look at why a mostly-linear, five-hour game became a genre-defining moment anyway.
7.5 / 10
A generically titled creature-collector RPG whose own Steam DLC catalogue verifies a pay-to-win structure — pre-leveled Legendary monsters and permanent EXP boosters sold separately on top of a NZ$21.99 base price — reviewed on an almost nonexistent early audience whose own achievement data shows essentially no one progressing past the tutorial.
3 / 10
A free clicker-RPG hybrid with real equipment-crafting depth behind the big damage numbers, whose own developer has now documented, in public and in unusually plain language, why it launched rocky, never recovered, and was abandoned nine months later.
5 / 10
