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 cozy pixel-art gathering and crafting game about rebuilding a village, sold on a shelf full of idle games and repeatedly mistaken for one. It isn't. It's a thirty-hour hand-managed crafting loop with a warm story attached, and at six dollars it's one of the easiest recommendations of the summer — for the right player.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeous, thematically serious entry in Bandai Namco's long-running JRPG series, built around six-character elemental combat and a slavery-and-liberation story that earns its weight. The game underneath is excellent. The launch-day decision to sell costume DLC that unlocks combat Artes and stat bonuses, advertised at every campfire, is still the thing its own playerbase brings up five years later.
8 / 10
A post-apocalyptic survival game set in a hand-built Dutch landscape, sold as a finished product at full price, with no save function in single-player. Quit, crash or lose connection and the run is gone. Everything else wrong with it is downstream of decisions like that one.
3.5 / 10
A years-in-the-making, Kickstarter-backed open-world farming sim that finally hit Early Access — and immediately ran into the one thing its audience cared most about. The co-op isn't the shared-farm co-op people bought it for, and the Mixed rating is mostly that discovery happening 392 times.
5.5 / 10
A 2012 answer to Diablo III's always-online auction house, built by former Blizzard North designers — and still worth playing today largely because of the mod scene that kept extending it after Runic Games itself closed down.
8 / 10
A full 3D remake of a 1995 Super Famicom classic that never got an official English release until this and a retro re-issue arrived together in 2019-2020 — faithful to the original's charm and class-change system, but missing the SNES version's local co-op and carrying writing a meaningful share of its own Steam reviews call dated.
7 / 10
A tactics RPG built on genuine terrain manipulation and a persuasion-driven branching story, from the producer behind Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler — and a game whose own Steam reviews argue at length about just how much dialogue sits between its battles.
8 / 10
Sixteen years on, Vindictus still has the best melee combat any free-to-play MMO has ever shipped — and a progression system that now fast-forwards you past almost every reason to use it. Nexon is still updating it monthly in 2026, which makes the state of the middle game harder to explain, not easier.
6 / 10
The week's biggest "new release" is actually a year-old Early Access game that just hit 1.0 — and the 1.0 finally brought the co-op everyone was waiting for. It's funny, generous and hugely popular. It's also a management sim that never lets you stop doing the menial jobs yourself.
7.5 / 10
A three-hour clicker RPG that is better designed than it needs to be, including the rare courtesy of building the autoclicker into the game instead of expecting you to install one. The problem isn't the length or the price — it's that the skill tree eventually out-damages every weapon you spent the game collecting.
6.5 / 10
Eighteen years old, still getting raids in 2026, and still the clearest example in the genre of a genuinely good game strapped to a business model its own players have been publicly begging it to change since before some of them could drive.
6.5 / 10
A CryEngine action RPG that scrapped fixed classes for a rotating passive wheel anyone can bend around any weapon — undone at launch by a server collapse that ate people's characters, and undone for good in September 2024 when the studio switched the multiplayer off forever.
6 / 10
A ten-dollar guild-management tactics RPG with a genuinely clever idea — your weapon determines your class — sitting behind a 90% Steam rating that doesn't survive close inspection. The game is decent. The review page is the story.
6 / 10
The trilogy-closing entry that fuses the worlds of the first two Xenoblade games into one shared battlefield, built around Chain Attacks and a class system deep enough to hold up across an eighty-hour campaign — with a story some major outlets still found predictable.
8.5 / 10
A shipwreck-survival action RPG that turns rescuing NPCs into a settlement-building system and backs it with some of the fastest, most readable real-time combat Nihon Falcom has ever shipped. The PC version carries genuine baggage from a rough 2018 launch and a since-rewritten English script, but the game underneath both has aged well.
7.5 / 10
A voxel zombie survival game built entirely around a scheduled siege that arrives on a known clock and gets worse every time. Eleven years in Early Access ended in July 2024 — the core loop is still one of the smartest in the genre, but the years show in how it looks, runs and argues with its own community about what it used to be.
7.5 / 10
A solo-developed guild management idle RPG with eleven classes, eleven tiered professions and hour-long raids, sold once for NZ$7.39 with no ads and nothing else to buy — an ambitious system let down at launch by dungeons and raids that don't repeat on their own, which is a strange gap in a game built around leaving it alone.
6.5 / 10
The game that put "idle" in front of a whole generation of mobile RPGs is still being patched weekly seven years on, folded this year into a "Companions" relaunch that reunites its oldest servers — underneath the fresh coat of paint, its gacha economy is still one of the harsher ones in the genre it helped invent.
6 / 10
A colony sim that turns its whole progression system into a programming lesson — you don't unlock better robots, you unlock better scripts, and the game lives or dies on whether that scripting language can keep up with the colony you build with it.
7.5 / 10
Backpack Hero turns the inventory screen itself into the entire combat system — item shape, orientation and neighbouring slots decide what a fight looks like, not a separate stats page. A look at whether that idea, and the game built around it, survived the jump from a free browser prototype to a finished commercial release the developer has since gone quiet on.
7.5 / 10
An action-combat MMO where the fighting is closer to a character-action game than a tab-target RPG, the real long-term game is an offline worker economy running nodes and trade routes while you're logged out, and gear upgrades can fail hard enough to destroy the item you spent months building. Ten years old, still getting weekly content, and still the most mechanically dense MMO most players will ever half-understand.
7.5 / 10
A one-time-purchase idle RPG that borrows every visual and structural trick of gacha hero collectors — six rarities, duplicate fusion, a 70-champion banner — and then declines to sell any of it, which makes it one of the more interesting monetisation experiments the genre has produced this year.
6.5 / 10
A two-person Swedish studio's pixel-art ARPG stacks skill trees, runes, sockets and artifacts into a genuinely deep build sandbox for the price of a takeaway meal — but the achievement data shows most players never see the endgame that's supposed to justify it.
7 / 10
An action RPG about playing an MMO, built around one verb — throwing an energy ball that ricochets off walls — that does double duty as the combat system and the language every dungeon puzzle is written in.
8.5 / 10
