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, ad-free phone-and-tablet design sim with real depth in its spec sheets and zero monetisation tricks — but a Steam score that only tells the truth once you split its mostly-German audience (90% positive) from its much cooler English-language corpus (60%, Mixed).
6.3 / 10
A US$2.99 solo-dev idle collectathon — Pokemon's capture loop grafted onto a Forager-style island economy — that Steam's own review corpus calls "Mixed" for reasons that are mostly about launch-week polish, not the underlying design, from a developer who patched hard for five months and then quietly moved on to other projects.
5.8 / 10
A NZ$4.49 pond-tycoon idler from Inner Realm Studios — the same solo developer's first game, made a year before Lumberjacked — checked against a thin but fully-read corpus of 77 Steam reviews, its achievement-completion curve, and the studio's own later fishing game, which one reviewer names directly as the better version of this idea.
5.8 / 10
A NZ$4.79 satirical idle clicker that spent two and a half years as "Install-Fee Tycoon," a beloved parody of the 2023 Unity pricing controversy, before a June 2026 rebrand retargeted its wit at the AI industry — a pivot its own Steam disclosure describes with a wink ("we used Claude Code to help us with... the code, bro"), and which a vocal but small minority of longtime fans call a betrayal of the original joke.
6.5 / 10
A NZ$14.80 clicker whose real product is tradeable Steam Marketplace drops, with a Mixed 61% score, an official "English" language listing contradicted by its own screenshots, and an achievement curve where even the easiest of 80 trophies clears for barely a quarter of owners.
4.5 / 10
A NZ$13.25 roguelite auto-battler whose own top-voted review calls it "extremely misleading" for shipping under an idle/clicker banner — its solo developer admitted within three days of launch that he "didn't realize" how different an idle game and an autobattler are to players, then stopped adding content two weeks later.
5 / 10
A NZ$7.39 merge-idler whose store page promises "keep earning money even when you're not playing" — a promise several of its Mixed-rated reviewers say doesn't hold, alongside a reset bug with no confirmation prompt and a 24-hour achievement some report as broken.
5.5 / 10
A NZ$5.99 xianxia-styled idle action-RPG almost nobody reviews in English — 95 of its 98 Steam reviews are Chinese, several from players with 200-plus hours reporting the game losing their entire save, on a title whose developer has spent the last two years promoting a newer game through this one's own news feed instead of patching it.
5 / 10
A NZ$17.49 semi-AFK tavern sim whose own reviewers keep naming the same superior rival, Tavern Master, unprompted — and whose staff AI several report collapsing once a tavern grows past a few dozen employees, with no update in the nine months since it left Early Access.
5.5 / 10
A free, AI-illustrated clicker that pairs 36 costumed poodles with genre-matched original songs — Mostly Positive at 77%, with a menu toggle that replaces the AI art and music entirely for players who'd rather not have either.
7 / 10
A NZ$7.39 idle tower-roguelite whose developer sold a $1.99 DLC for basic stat tracking, apologised and moved the information into the base game the same day the backlash hit — but whose most detailed, veteran-idle-genre critics argue the 2024 expansion buried the genre's core promise under RNG-gated progression and a zone-pushing "noob trap."
6 / 10
A NZ$4.49 duck-themed incremental whose own store page promises offline income and careful balance — and whose players report an "extremely slow" AFK system and upgrade costs that hit a flat "MAX" wall well before the 15-achievement list is done.
6 / 10
A carrier-launched arcade combat flight sim from Ovilex Software, released the same day, at the same price, as a civilian sibling title built on what reads as the same engine — and checked here against the developer's own decade-long Steam catalog rather than a review corpus this game doesn't have yet.
4.5 / 10
A budget open-world flight sim from mobile studio Ovilex, offering 31 airliners and 50-plus real-world-inspired airports for one upfront price, launched the same day as a combat-flight sibling from the same publisher at the same price point, with zero user reviews yet to test either one against.
5 / 10
A staff-wielding metroidvania that took six years to reach Steam, changing developer partway through — smooth movement and near-unanimous praise for its pixel-and-3D art sit alongside a shallow combat loop and a reward economy that gives exploration almost nothing to find.
7 / 10
A solo-developed first-person military shooter built in Unreal Engine 5 around a six-environment campaign and an AI-supported squad, launched 5 August 2026 with two Turkish- language user reviews, zero Steam achievements and a documented mission that its own first buyer could not finish.
4 / 10
A tile-based, permadeath MMORPG built and coded almost entirely by one developer since 2017, released on Steam a day before this review with no cash shop of any kind, a single Frankfurt server capped at 500 players — and, at the moment of checking, three people actually on it.
5 / 10
A solo-developer party idle RPG that opened Early Access three days ago with exactly three heroes, one boss, one roguelike dungeon mode called the Rift, and a developer who says outright that the price will keep climbing as content is added — reviewed against a build with zero Steam user reviews and a live player count in the single digits.
6 / 10
A 4-player co-op anime bullet heaven from Miki Games, built in Unreal Engine 5.5 and split across a roguelike Survival mode and a crystal-defending Defense mode — reviewed three days after launch against a store page with zero user reviews, no achievements defined and a character roster that doesn't quite match its own marketing copy.
6 / 10
A one-day-old solo-developer idle game built around a single inversion of the genre's usual habit — your number grows faster the longer you refuse to spend it, and every purchase resets it to zero — spread across six upgrades, three currencies and two mirrored prestige ladders, for NZ$4.31 with no user reviews yet on record.
6 / 10
A ten-minigame summer party collection from Japanese minigame specialist SAT-BOX, built around split-screen bouts with rocket fireworks, somen-noodle slides and mosquito swatting — checked on launch day against a Steam page that shows zero reviews and zero concurrent players.
6 / 10
A dice-poker deckbuilder set in a shamanic purgatory, reviewed one day after launch on a single professional review, a demo-era user corpus, and Steam's own early data — because the full game itself has exactly one Steam review to its name so far.
7 / 10
A solo-developer take on Breakout that swaps the usual flat 2D field for a first-person, zero-gravity paddle view across 32 fixed levels, backed by a sixteen-symbol power-up alphabet and a purely local high-score list. Released 5 August 2026 with no Steam achievements, no user reviews and no press coverage yet.
6 / 10
A one-dollar, one-week-old clicker about tapping a capybara and buying Brazilian-themed upgrades — with a genuinely inventive twist where three-quarters of its 80 achievements exist purely to decorate your Steam profile, and a progression ladder with no visible prestige loop.
5 / 10
