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 gorgeous, unusually faithful Indiana Jones game with excellent puzzles — and hardware requirements strict enough that its second most-upvoted critic warns you'll discover the problem after the refund window closes.
7.5 / 10
A zombie-apocalypse colony builder with a genuinely singular hook — using real-world map data to let you fortify your own actual neighbourhood — that's spent more than two years in Early Access with the same recurring complaints, about squad micromanagement and interruption pop-ups, still surfacing in this week's reviews.
7 / 10
Zachtronics in three dimensions, and the one its own siblings' reviewers keep calling fun — except it rates below them, costs the most, and its critics say it isn't the factory game the name implies.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely beautiful open-world dress-up game whose Steam score is a permanent record of the worst month in its life — and whose players describe it, accurately, as both a work of art and a predatory gacha.
6.5 / 10
A twenty-year-old PopCap classic that quietly invented a lot of what idle games do now — still 97.4% positive, never patched, and roughly a third of its critics can't get it to run.
7 / 10
A haunting, wordless puzzle-platformer from the makers of Limbo, whose ending has divided players in exactly the same way for nearly a decade — not through controversy, but through a deliberate ambiguity some find profound and others find frustrating.
9 / 10
A tense, punishing tactical shooter with genuinely excellent gunplay, now navigating the real aftermath of its developer's confirmed 2023 layoffs and subsequent ownership changes — a corporate instability story its own players have watched unfold in real time.
6.5 / 10
FTL's creators followed up randomness with certainty — a tiny, perfect-information tactics puzzle where every enemy move is telegraphed in advance. Most players call the trade a triumph; a consistent minority of FTL fans still feel the resentment the top positive review admits to feeling at first.
8.5 / 10
A one-day-old arena shooter played almost entirely in the dark, where a pulsing heartbeat is your only light source — reviewed on a genuinely complete sample of its first sixteen reviews, every single one of them positive.
8 / 10
The first genuine successor to a beloved 1999 tactics classic in over two decades — a competent, often very good mercenary squad RPG that a vocal share of the original's veteran fanbase says simplified too much of what made Jagged Alliance 2 legendary.
7.5 / 10
A NZ$7.39 mining incremental that sold 100,000 copies in seventeen days, is finished by three quarters of the people who buy it, and spends its second half padding a two-hour game past the refund window. Its own reviewers name the trick.
7 / 10
A bigger sequel to a well-liked incremental that fell twelve points in the ratings — because it doubled the length without fixing the thing that made the first game's back half a chore.
6 / 10
A physics-based cooking roguelike where ingredients tumble and collide inside a cosmic cauldron instead of cards sitting in a hand — genuinely inventive, well liked across hundreds of early reviews, and repeatedly accused by its own players of leaning on luck more than it should.
7 / 10
A funny, genuinely inventive clicker about feeding kiwis to kiwis — with a hover-click that spares your wrist, and a save-loss bug patched in 2022 that players were still reporting three months ago.
7 / 10
A co-op zombie classic still Overwhelmingly Positive 17 years on, beloved for exactly what it doesn't have — no loot boxes, no unlocks, no grind — held back for the entire span of its Steam review history by one specific, remarkably persistent complaint about its Versus community.
8 / 10
A solo developer's co-op scavenging horror-comedy that became one of the defining games of its era, still funny and still tense two years on — while its own reviews increasingly argue about whether the person who made it has moved on from it.
7.5 / 10
The black-and-white puzzle-platformer that arguably started the modern atmospheric-indie wave, still Very Positive fifteen years later — and still facing the exact same trial-and-error criticism its earliest reviewers wrote, sometimes in nearly identical words.
8.5 / 10
A free turn-based RPG built from world literature, run on a coin flip, updated every fortnight for three and a half years — and criticised almost exclusively by people with two hundred hours in it.
7.5 / 10
A classic Warcraft III-and-StarCraft-flavoured RTS from a solo developer who spent three to five years building it with a community of beta testers before MicroProse stepped in to publish its Early Access launch — and reviewer after reviewer reaches for the exact same comparison to describe it.
7.5 / 10
A lovely four-hour game about scrubbing an alien ocean clean, 98% positive, whose only real complaint was the price — and the price has since fallen 70%.
7 / 10
A free-to-play sci-fi idle RPG built around a genuine, developer-stated no-pay-to-win promise, an active in-game chat community, and an engaged solo developer — praised by a striking number of very-high-playtime reviewers, with real friction over gear durability and one serious, unverified allegation about how the launch event tracked activity.
7 / 10
A brutal, funny Mario Party from the Buckshot Roulette developer, for ten dollars — with no matchmaking, and a developer who has now said plainly that there never will be.
7.5 / 10
A handsome, deliberately linear twelve-hour crime story in 1900s Sicily that three in five buyers actually finish — released at NZ$119.95, which is the number most of its arguments are really about.
7 / 10
The best-designed digital card game in years, attached to an acquisition economy where the complaint isn't that you can pay to win — it's that you can't reliably pay to get the card you want at all.
6.5 / 10
