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 co-op horror-comedy about hauling wrong-looking wildlife through a national park that shouldn't exist, held back from the genre's top table by a punishment mechanic that erases a night's work for reasons the player often can't see coming.
6.5 / 10
A solo developer's Early Access debut that grafts an upgrade tree, phase gates and a purchasable "Idle Mode" onto a classic Breakout loop — except the game's own tooltip says flatly that idle mode does not earn points while the game is closed, four days into a launch that so far has three concurrent players and one review.
6 / 10
A NZ$12.49 seven-currency idle economy game whose own most-invested reviewers — median 23.7 hours played, well above its positive reviewers' 5.7 — describe a triple prestige system that resets everything for nothing, a save that "bricked itself" at 135 hours, and an achievement curve that halves at every difficulty gate.
4 / 10
A NZ$5.99 solo-developed idle RPG that builds a genuinely large xianxia cultivation ladder — four realms, twelve stages, a reincarnation-and-soul-perk prestige loop — undercut by a recurring, still-unresolved save-corruption bug and a depth ceiling its own most invested players describe hitting after two or three lifetimes.
6.5 / 10
A NZ$3.83 debut-adjacent incremental from Shadow Games Software where you crank a hand generator, sell the joules you produce into a demand-driven market, and reinvest the money into wood and steel producers that build power plants across eight declared eras — real chain depth, but the marketing never actually promises the away-from-keyboard earnings the genre is built on.
6 / 10
A three-day-old idle ARPG from Chinese solo studio TUNA TUN that docks a full loot-and-buildcraft game — skill trees, randomised affixes, gem sockets, a 50-level dungeon path and an infinite Ascension ladder above it — into a fixed panel in the corner of your screen, undercut by an immovable window, a tedious itemisation flow and freeze bugs its nine early reviewers are already naming.
6.5 / 10
A NZ$10.99 co-op village-building idler from solo French studio Eragone, checked against its own achievement data and a 37-review Steam corpus — both of which say the "together" in the title is something most owners never actually use.
5.5 / 10
A Chinese-developed roguelike bullet-hell shooter about a hero possessed by an escaped demon king, wrapping a huge auto-attack build-crafting system and a class-change progression ladder in an RPG genre tag it only half earns.
7 / 10
A NZ$0.95 debut incremental from IncBirdsGames where you click birds out of the sky, feed and sell them, and grind through a 16-upgrade tree gated by two currencies at once — a charming physics hook wrapped around a UI its own genre curator calls "clunky as hell."
4.5 / 10
A three-day-old solo-style release that grafts a genuine tech-tree-and-prestige incremental onto a real-time bug-catching shooter — aim a frog's tongue with the mouse, clear timed waves of insects, then spend the gold on a large branching upgrade grid — for NZ$6.29 with exactly one Steam review on record.
6 / 10
A macro-focused RTS where you claw territory back from a robot horde that already owns the whole map, spend every watt of power on a rolling trade-off between economy, defence and offence, and push toward a 16-mission campaign the developer rates at 25-plus hours on Hard. Released 6 August 2026 with zero user reviews yet and a demo that's been public since March.
6.5 / 10
A big-number aquarium idler that genuinely earns its Idler tag — fry-pack gacha, a quadrillion-scale currency and a decoration economy with real payoffs — but its own audience keeps calling it a Chillquarium copy, and the saltwater half has sat unfinished since mid-2025.
6.5 / 10
The 2011 browser game that helped drag tower defense out of the Flash-portal era and into a genre of its own, still sitting at 96% positive on Steam a decade after its 2014 Unity port — mostly because the core loop of towers, heroes and boss fights it invented is still the one every entry since, including Ironhide's own sequels, gets measured against.
8.5 / 10
A solo-developer dungeon crawler where a small green-hooded adventurer works through expanding stone chambers on stamina, hearts and a growing key ring, with almost nobody outside the developer having weighed in on it yet.
5.5 / 10
A solo-developer, first-person turn-based deckbuilding roguelike that launched into Early Access on 6 August 2026 with three classes, over 100 relics and a ten-tier ascension ladder already in place — reviewed the following day, with zero user reviews yet to check the pitch against and achievement stats that resolve to roughly two reporting accounts.
6.5 / 10
A NZ$7.39 solo-built idle hack-and-slash whose loot ladder hollows out around the mythical and divine tiers — verified by the developer's own promotional screenshot of a veteran save file — and whose lead developer announced in January 2026 that the game will never be updated again.
6 / 10
An incremental heist game that flips the loot-RPG premise on its head — heroes clear the dungeons and find the treasure, and you play the goblin who steals it back from them while they're still inside.
7 / 10
A NZ$7.39 first-person forest-chopping incremental from Inner Realm Studios and Dumb Duck Games — 680 Steam reviews at 82.5% positive, checked against a full pull of every English negative review and the game's own achievement-completion curve, both of which land on the same structural complaint: a strong first two hours, then a wall.
6.5 / 10
A one-day-old Japanese horror walking sim whose entire hook is a gaze-driven fog of war — the neighbourhood only exists where you're actually looking, and looking is also how the thing hunting you finds you. Reviewed on launch day, against zero Steam reviews and the developer's own two-title track record.
7 / 10
An aggregator filed this NZ$1.49 release as a Clicker; it is a 50-question Russian internet-meme trivia quiz with AI-recreated images, no sound, a fixed question order that guts its own replay value, and a review corpus that is 86% Russian-language.
4.3 / 10
A desktop-overlay idle aquarium that genuinely earns its Idler tag and out-designs its rivals on tank capacity and how literally it sits on your desktop, but a fifteen-month-old review corpus this thin, two serious memory-leak reports and thirteen months of developer silence keep it from matching the library's better-supported pond games.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed idle mining clicker that left seven months of Early Access on 6 August 2026 with a genuinely novel twist — spending points to weight the odds of its own random events — but arrived with a three-review corpus already reporting broken pet slots, a muted-sound bug, and a gem shop that won't take money.
6.5 / 10
A loop-based analog-horror game where you replay the same corridor hunting for what changed, told through VHS static and a flashlight that keeps something in the dark at bay — released two days ago to exactly two user reviews, split one positive and one negative.
6 / 10
A three-day-old Early Access idle RPG that runs thirteen separate skill trackers off one RuneScape-flavoured template, lets you train two of them at once, and caps its offline catch-up at a clearly documented 24 hours — for a one-time NZ$4.31 with no reviews, no achievements curve worth reading, and a developer FAQ that admits the balance still needs work.
7 / 10
