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 solo-developed first-person open-world RPG that regenerates a 250 km² province every campaign and wraps combat, crafting, family upkeep, crime and slavery-and-abolition systems around one shared skill ladder — launched into Early Access with an 18-to-24-month roadmap to 1.0 and its main storyline not yet in the build.
6.5 / 10
A NZ$13.25 picross-minesweeper hybrid built around one continuous 60,000-tile puzzle split into 200-plus regions, where over half of owners fight all the way through to full completion — undercut by three of the game's only eleven English negatives independently accusing its Egyptology trivia of being undisclosed AI text.
7.2 / 10
A desktop pet, not a game in any conventional sense — Wukong or Amei sit on your screen, react to your typing and clicking, and let you draw their outfits by hand. Reviewed two days after launch, with almost no review corpus yet to judge it by.
6 / 10
A third-person sci-fi horde shooter that pairs Vampire Survivors-scale enemy counts with build-your-own ARPG crafting, launched into Early Access with a specific roadmap, an honest price and zero independent track record to check any of it against.
6 / 10
A 3-6 player multiplayer parkour game that pairs precision platforming with a build-your-loadout ability deck and a level-based unlock ladder, launched with a single Russian-language user review and zero people playing it at the moment this was checked.
5.5 / 10
A story-driven sci-fi Memory-game adventure — flip cards to find matching pairs, battle enemies and stranded astronauts with them — filed under "Massively Multiplayer" on Steam despite a single-player campaign, a PvP mode still labelled Beta on its own store page, zero user reviews and zero concurrent players at the time this was checked.
4.5 / 10
A live-action interactive drama about a double-agent infiltrating a collaborationist spy agency in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1939, built on genuine branching and a day-cycle resource system, undercut by a narrative its own dedicated audience says leans far harder into romance than the espionage thriller it was sold as.
6.5 / 10
A budget one-on-one arena brawler that leans hard into a "classic 90s fighting" pitch, published by a company built on reviving old and obscure game libraries, on a Steam page with no user reviews, no press coverage and no achievement data yet to check it against.
6 / 10
A memory-match card grid wrapped around a genuine dungeon-crawling RPG — flip pairs to fight monsters, loot treasure and trigger traps, then take what survives back to a Guild hub to level a deck capped at eleven cards.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed turn-based roguelite where a single squire fights nine battles in a row per arena with no rest between them, so the wound you're carrying into fight seven matters as much as the one you took in fight one.
7 / 10
A first-person prison survival sim that launched into Early Access on 5 August 2026 with a broken opening objective — every one of its first user reviews describes the morning roll call softlocking progress, and a hotfix the next day only partly closed the gap between the pitch and the build.
3.5 / 10
A one-day-old pixel RPG about a teenager who discovers psychic powers in a sleepy mountain town and enters a boss-only tournament with no map marker to guide him — a tight, five-dollar story built to finish in an afternoon, with zero Steam reviews yet to test the pitch.
6.5 / 10
A free four-day preview of Stones Games' inspection-sim-meets-zombie-shooter, released a week after the paid full game it advertises, and dogged by the same lag and AI-voiceover complaints — plus a Steam community that keeps naming the much bigger game it resembles.
5 / 10
A first-person ranch sim that spent a year in public demos before its Early Access launch, and it shows — the "done" list is unusually long for a day-one build. What isn't done yet is co-op, and the recommended specs ask for more GPU than a cozy farm game should need.
6.5 / 10
A free top-down horror game about escaping a bar full of monsters across five linear, differently-themed levels, from a two-person team on their apparent first published release — with a storefront listing that discloses nothing to buy.
6 / 10
A single-run, high-score arcade roguelike that grafts Breakout's paddle-and-bricks loop onto item-build synergy from over 120 randomised pickups, with permadeath ending every attempt and no persistent carryover between runs. Released 5 August 2026 with no user reviews and no press coverage yet.
6.5 / 10
Real chess, played with real rules, where every piece you capture hands you a spell card that can freeze a bishop, rotate a corner of the board, or turn a rook into a decoy king. A tactical roguelite built for players who already know how a knight moves.
7 / 10
A solo-developed cryptogram game dressed as occult detective fiction — decode short runic scriptures with frequency analysis and context, then type your own conclusion about what really happened.
6.5 / 10
A five-dollar arcade game that turns Hiragana, Katakana and the 104 kanji of JLPT N5 into a catch-and-dodge score-attack loop, organised into real thematic vocabulary groups rather than one shuffled deck — released two days ago with zero user reviews, zero achievement completions in its harder categories, and a developer patch note already admitting some achievements weren't firing.
6 / 10
A DVD-logo corner-hit clicker that grows into a three-mode idle RPG — mining, farming and fishing all feed the same currency as the bouncing logo — but it is a windowed Steam game, not an actual screensaver, and its store page never claims to earn a cent while it isn't open.
7 / 10
A NZ$1.49 solo-developer horror game about a child escaping a cult's private chapel — verified here against Steam's own genre field ("Indie," which says nothing) and its top-voted community tag ("Idler," which says something wrong). Three puzzles, two endings, no idle or incremental mechanic anywhere in it.
6 / 10
A local-multiplayer physics brawler set in a Japanese public bathhouse, where the "Survivor" in the name means outlasting three rivals on a frictionless floor with a water gun, not building a horde-clearing arsenal — a genre-savvy buyer needs to know that before anything else, along with the fact that every mode here is played on one couch, not online.
6 / 10
Read review of SENTO SURVIVOR : Slip, Grab, and Bathe in Glory!
A roguelite auto-battler where you draft slimes wave by wave, decide which ones hold the line and which roam free, and defend a King who's surrounded on every side rather than tucked behind a lane — a solo debut from Softkeep Studio, reviewed the day after launch.
7 / 10
A NZ$5.99 solo-developer hybrid that bolts a proper node-based skill tree onto Snake, making the run itself the resource loop rather than the thing an idle game politely ignores — checked against a 433-review corpus that agrees almost unanimously on where the game turns from clever to punishing.
6.5 / 10
