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 first-person fantasy dungeon crawler where every raid ends one of two ways — you walk out through a portal with everything you found, or you die and hand it all to whoever killed you. Two years into Early Access on Steam, the extraction loop is still the sharpest thing about it, and the studio's legal history is still not fully behind it.
7 / 10
A NZ$5.11 incremental about optimising messy hard drives, whose Mixed Steam rating splits cleanly along a timeline rather than a taste — a rocky launch day the developer patched fast, and a slower, still-unresolved design gate that keeps a chunk of players stuck clicking long before the game lets them stop.
6.5 / 10
A factory-and-colony sim where the automation isn't belts or menus of orders but a real node-based programming language you wire up yourself, one behavior graph per unit. The most technically ambitious game in its genre, and honest proof of how much that ambition costs at the door.
7 / 10
A free browser incremental about a single dragon that eventually consumes the entire numeral system, built solo (with two collaborators) by Demonin and finished — deliberately — in 2024, with no further updates planned.
7.5 / 10
The Definitive Edition of Dragon Quest XI doesn't reinvent the turn-based JRPG, and that's the point — an orchestral score, a full second 2D presentation of the same 100-hour campaign, and combat that trusts the format instead of subverting it.
8.5 / 10
Read review of Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age — Definitive Edition
A menu-only farming MMO that has quietly run since 2021 with no ads and a genuinely optional shop, propped up by a community wiki so thorough that half the game's actual strategy lives outside the app.
7 / 10
Square Enix rebuilt Final Fantasy as a single-character action game with a Devil May Cry pedigree and the most ambitious set pieces the genre has ever staged, then paid for it with the party control, gear depth and build variety that used to define the series.
7.5 / 10
A NZ$2.69 boat-and-auction idle tycoon whose "Mixed" Steam rating is mostly a fossil record of its 17-month Early Access run — and whose core complaint, that the whole game empties out inside two hours with nothing built to replace it, still checks out against the game's own achievement data today.
4.5 / 10
Cygames' stand-alone action RPG wraps a four-player hunting-game loop inside a JRPG's full production budget, and the combat mostly earns the spectacle around it. This is not the mobile gacha that shares its name — it's a single upfront purchase with no pulls and no premium currency — but its sigil-driven, Proud Quest endgame asks more patience than it repays.
7.5 / 10
Obsidian shrinks you to the size of an ant and lets that single premise reshape exploration, combat and crafting all at once. Nearly four years after 1.0, the backyard is still one of the smartest survival maps in the genre — even as Obsidian's attention has visibly moved on to the sequel.
8 / 10
The mobile half of a decade-old hero-collector empire, reviewed under the name it actually ships with today — a competent auto-battler with a genuinely flexible manual/auto combat switch, buried under the industry's most notorious ad campaign and a monetisation stack that never really lets up.
5.5 / 10
Kolibri Games takes the miner-elevator-warehouse template it invented in 2016 and reskins it as a bank, with Marketing, Service Windows, Vault and Main Hall standing in for the usual dig-lift-sell chain. The loop still works; the shop around it leans harder on ads and loot boxes than the studio's older, better-loved games.
5.5 / 10
A free browser incremental where you grow a zombie horde one infected townsperson at a time, with genuinely deep golem, skeleton and rune systems sitting on top of the usual spawn-and-wait loop — held back by a punishing late-game grind and a developer who stopped updating it in 2021.
6.5 / 10
A long-running idle RPG about a monster-forest slime clan grinding gear and dungeons, still pulling ten million-plus downloads years after launch — undercut lately by an ad frequency its own players say has quietly gotten much worse.
5.5 / 10
Twenty-two years before "life-skill game" became a genre, Mabinogi built one — a rank-based skill system and an ageing/rebirth loop that still let a character who never fights become a genuinely finished build, currently mid-transplant into a new Unreal Engine 5 body.
7.5 / 10
The original 2D side-scrolling MMORPG is still running twenty-three years after its Korean debut, still free to download, and still built around a gear-enhancement gamble severe enough that a Korean regulator fined its publisher for hiding how it worked.
6.5 / 10
Moonlighter splits itself between a dungeon-crawling roguelite and a shop-management sim, and the two halves are tied together by a genuinely clever idea — you set your own prices and read the customers to find out if you got it right. The question worth answering eight years on is whether that idea, and the combat around it, still hold up once the spreadsheet gets written.
7.5 / 10
Team Ninja builds a three-stance, Ki Pulse-driven combat system deeper than almost anything else in the genre, then buries a big chunk of its own goodwill under Diablo-scale loot noise and mission design that leans hard on reused level layouts.
8 / 10
Nolla Games' falling-sand roguelite simulates every pixel of fire, gas, liquid and rock as one honest physical system, then hands you a wand editor deep enough to break that system on purpose. Four and a half years after its 1.0 release, only one in ten owners has ever finished it.
9 / 10
The sequel that actually lets its eight travelers meet each other, wrapped around the same Break and Boost combat that made the original worth playing and a day/night toggle that changes what every town has to offer.
8.5 / 10
A NZ$7.99 mining incremental that puts a slot machine in the middle of its progression loop, then declines to say clearly what a bad spin actually costs you — a genuinely interesting hook, undercut by how little the game or its early reception have yet proven about it.
6.5 / 10
A one-developer idle RPG that hides a genuinely dense passive-perk tree and a town worth automating behind a rough Android build that still crashes for some players seven years after its first prototype.
5.5 / 10
The version of Persona 5 that's actually for sale everywhere now, and the one worth reviewing on its own mechanical terms — a turn-based JRPG whose real engine isn't the combat or the style, it's a calendar that turns every evening into a resource-allocation decision with consequences that outlast the day.
9 / 10
The 2020 game that started the shape-cutting automation genre, built by stripping Factorio down to logistics alone — no combat, no scarcity, no enemies. Cheap, historically important, and rougher than the sequel it spawned.
7.5 / 10
