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 dirt-cheap, small-studio click-and-expand supermarket tycoon that borrows its name from a much bigger, unrelated hit — with a genuinely hooky core loop for the few who've reviewed it, undercut by a bug that reportedly blocks the last fifteen levels and a string of rough-edge complaints, from missing achievements to an un-renamed Unity default company ID.
4.5 / 10
A taskbar-dwelling pixel-pet companion app from solo developer Ascalon Games, released free in May 2023, later moved to a one-time NZ$4.49 purchase with Steam Workshop support for custom pets added in January 2025.
6.5 / 10
A storybook-framed JRPG/CRPG hybrid about hunting an immensely powerful dragon, built around a genuinely deep character-building system that draws real praise — sitting at Very Positive on Steam, though this review's full read of its negative sample finds a persistent grind for build progression and a real handful of UI and crafting bugs underneath the praise.
7 / 10
A Japanese doujin-scene idle game about looping rail carts around a base to gather materials and craft your way through dungeons, built on genuine long-term content but undermined by having no offline progression at all.
5 / 10
A solo/small-team pixel-art roguelike ARPG that opened to a torrent of goodwill in January 2025 -- same-day hotfixes, a warmly received early roadmap, comparisons to Octopath Traveler and Ragnarok Online -- and sustained nine months of real content updates before its news feed went quiet in October 2025, leaving a genuinely appealing but structurally shallow five-zone game that a growing number of 2026 reviews now call abandoned.
6.5 / 10
Ubisoft's revival of one of PC strategy gaming's most beloved franchises launched broken, redesigned around combat its own decades-long fans say abandoned what made the series special, and has received exactly three news posts in over two years — this review reads the whole arc, including the rival made by the original series' own former developers that fans now point to instead.
4 / 10
A charming, Pikmin-inspired storybook fantasy adventure about two runaway children commanding a herd of forest spirits -- Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam for its art and atmosphere, with a consistent, specific complaint that its combat and controls never match the genre giant it invites comparison to.
7.5 / 10
A mystery-investigation adventure game set in an oriental fantasy city of humans, dragons and anthropomorphic "beastlings," Very Positive across 154 English-language reviews for its writing and cast -- and consistently misjudged from its cover art, with reviewers repeatedly reassuring newcomers put off by the furry-adjacent character designs that there's nothing adult about it, just a slow-starting, dialogue-heavy story that most reviewers say pays off.
7 / 10
Lunar Ray Games' Kickstarter-funded, Castlevania-inspired metroidvania is Very Positive on Steam, but its negative review sample splits into two genuinely different arguments -- one about real, specific shortcomings in combat, length and writing craft, and a separate, unusually large one objecting not to mechanics but to the game's prominent queer and trans representation.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developer factory-automation game that ships complete rather than in Early Access, with a genuinely responsive dev and procedurally generated worlds, but that its own review corpus repeatedly measures against Factorio, Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program — and finds wanting on the tutorial, controls and combat that stand between you and the automation.
6 / 10
A cheap, cheerfully-written Early Access merchant RPG whose title promises trading and whose actual difficulty curve punishes it — this review's full read of every English-language negative review finds a consistent, two-year-old complaint that carrying trade goods is what gets a caravan killed, alongside a smaller but serious cluster of reports of full system crashes.
6 / 10
A solo-developed idle clicker about breaking open an endless supply of chests, with five branching skill trees and a rarity-tiered treasure log underneath the numbers. Genuinely deep for its price and free of any monetisation tricks, undercut by a save-loss bug that keeps costing long-term players their progress three years after launch.
6.5 / 10
A VR-only mech-punching roguelite that reviewers routinely call one of the best physics games the headset has, praised for locomotion so smooth it solves VR's usual nausea problem — reviewed here as a genuinely mature release, since Steam's own patch history shows it's still being actively expanded two and a half years after launch, multiplayer included.
8 / 10
A cheap, small-studio idle auto battler with a workable persistent-upgrade loop, undercut by a very small early review sample that's split on whether the core auto-battle feature even works as advertised, plus a confirmed absence of cloud saves and a widely-reported thinness of content just two days after launch.
5 / 10
A solo/small-team deckbuilding roguelite auto-battler built around a deliberately minimalist "1+4" card system, Very Positive across 225 English reviews for genuinely addictive run-to-run strategy and a year-plus of monthly content updates -- while carrying an unusually loud and well-corroborated controversy over AI-generated art and music that the developers disclose openly on the store page rather than deny.
6.5 / 10
A solo developer's nearly two-year passion project, a procedurally-generated first-person voxel mining and exploration game with light AI-uprising narrative, released for NZ$1.49 in June 2023 with a perfect, if very small, positive review record.
7 / 10
A solo-developer chatroom-fishing game that turned into one of 2024's biggest indie surprises, sitting Overwhelmingly Positive across 70,000+ reviews — but a full read of its negative sample and Steam's own announcement feed shows a game whose developer has gone quiet since January 2025, leaving a well-documented lobby-security problem unresolved.
7 / 10
A 3D coin-pusher arcade game wrapped around a lich army-building RPG layer, released November 2023 after its solo developer publicly paused production over the Unity pricing controversy, and still receiving support patches in August 2026.
6.5 / 10
A polished, charming solo-developer "unlosable tower defense" incremental — enemies march toward your walls and fall into a river of lava every single time — that's genuinely delightful for its first island before veteran idle players report every later island is a reskin of the first, and undercut by the single most-upvoted complaint in its review corpus: unremovable pop-up ads for other games inside the settings menu of a paid release.
6 / 10
A surreal, Love-de-Lic-inspired adventure about a cursed intelligence bound to a corpse, helping a desert island's misfits across a game explicitly built around 24 replays -- one of the most positively received games this lane has covered (98.75%), with the tiny negative sample converging on a specific, real complaint about late-game grind and unclear puzzle guidance.
8 / 10
A roguelite beat 'em up from the Streets of Rage 4 team that critics and players both rate as one of 2025's genre highlights -- hand-drawn combat and worldbuilding that land almost universally, undercut by real multiplayer stability issues and a vocal minority who find its Hades-shaped meta-progression more familiar than fresh.
8 / 10
A genuinely novel deckbuilding RPG that fuses poker hands with fantasy ability cards, wrapped in lush, fully-voiced presentation -- Very Positive on Steam, but close to half of its negative reviews single out the same confusing interface, and a quarter raise the poker system's luck swings as a real fairness complaint rather than a taste issue.
6.5 / 10
A hand-drawn, ambitiously huge metroidvania set in a ruined fantasy world -- reviewers are close to unanimous that the art is gorgeous, but well over half the negative reviews sampled for this piece raise the same specific complaint: a map so large and under-signposted that players spend hours lost rather than exploring.
6.5 / 10
A very cheap sci-fi idle clicker whose ten planets and resources turn out to be copy-pasted variations on the same system, according to a strongly corroborated group of reviewers who each independently report seeing everything the game offers within minutes.
4.5 / 10
