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 visually extraordinary sequel that nearly every reviewer, on both sides of the score, agrees looks and sounds better than its beloved predecessor -- while a wide majority of its critics argue the writing that made that predecessor special didn't come along for the ride.
7.5 / 10
A charming season-manipulation fantasy adventure with a genuinely smart central mechanic and a well-told story, sunk at launch by a level of bugs, screen-tearing and broken abilities that both critics and players describe as feeling closer to a beta than a finished game.
5 / 10
A Viking colony sim with a genuinely loved foundation — Rimworld's scheduling, Medieval Dynasty's village-building, Valheim's Nordic survival — undercut by villager AI that both its biggest fans and its critics independently name as the one thing standing between it and greatness.
6 / 10
A single Japanese developer's 15-year solo project -- a sprawling 2D action RPG that earned an Overwhelmingly Positive badge on scale and ambition alone, with a review corpus that argues hard over its writing, its grind, and whether its combat gets too busy to read.
8 / 10
A mobile studio's first console-scale action RPG -- charming art, a satisfying weapon-combo system once it opens up, and a critical consensus that politely calls the whole thing forgettable.
6 / 10
A roguelike deckbuilder that swaps cards for dice and damage/block for a dual Purification/Corruption system -- gorgeous, genuinely inventive, and Very Positive on Steam, but close to half its negative reviews cite overwhelming complexity and a similar share cite dice variance that several reviewers call unfair rather than merely risky.
7 / 10
A cozy, sincerely heart-warming miniature adventure where every problem is solved by peeling and placing the right sticker — beloved almost universally, with its one real thorn being an achievement list that forces a second playthrough to fully complete.
8 / 10
An open-world action RPG about sand-surfing across a desert world with a sentient gauntlet, launched to "Forspoken 2.0" comparisons and a co-op bug so severe it became the single most-upvoted review the game has ever received — genuinely improved since by patches that recast a voice actor and reworked combat, though the co-op flaw was still being reported in 2025.
6 / 10
The strategy series' Bronze-Age take on the Iliad drew a record-breaking 7.5 million free claims on its Epic Games Store launch day, then met a very different reception a year later on Steam, where a stack of character DLC, a fantasy expansion and even a paid gore pack turned "half the roster is locked behind paywalls" into the review corpus's central complaint.
6 / 10
A dark fantasy idle ARPG about gearing up a build and sending it off on automated looting runs -- a real if thin Mixed reception built on specific complaints about bland passives and unfinished translation, overshadowed since launch by a genuine, press-covered controversy over the solo developer's Steam AI disclosure, which argued AI use was a financial necessity and drew public pushback from other independent developers.
5.5 / 10
A short, physics-driven incremental about buying, upgrading and prestiging a swarm of bouncing balls to smash cores -- praised by reviewers for making the genre's usual buy-order puzzle feel like an actual strategic decision, with a real, specific complaint about late-game visual effects tanking performance and triggering photosensitivity concerns.
7 / 10
A gorgeously drawn, lofi-scored panda laundromat that plays almost nothing like a conventional idle game and everything like a desktop focus timer with decorations, which delights the audience that wants exactly that and frustrates the sizeable share who bought it expecting real systems underneath the art.
6 / 10
A gorgeous, Kickstarted turn-based RPG built from Joe Madureira's 1990s comic, praised almost universally for its art and combat variety and just as consistently accused of burying both under grinding and pacing that never speeds up -- nine years on, the achievement data backs up exactly where players quit.
7 / 10
Harebrained Schemes' Kickstarter-funded, XCom-shaped adaptation of the tabletop mech wargame is Very Positive on Steam eight years on, but its own review history shows a genuine split -- a mercenary-company campaign many call the best BattleTech has ever played, sitting on top of a punishing economy and mission balance that Paradox stopped patching years ago.
6.5 / 10
A medieval settlement-builder with a genuinely strong building system wrapped around combat many call broken and a grind several find exhausting, complicated further by community anxiety about the developer's history — anxiety this review's own check finds only partly holds up against Bellwright's own active patch record.
5.5 / 10
An open-world "kung-fu fable" RPG about a mutant animal saving a post-apocalyptic world, announced in 2017 and delayed for years while its hype grew far ahead of what shipped -- Mixed on Steam, with a review pattern that's remarkably consistent about exactly where it falls apart.
6 / 10
A small Norse-mythology platformer with a striking art style and a review base too thin and scattered to support a confident verdict either way -- read in full and reported honestly rather than padded into something more authoritative than the evidence allows.
4.5 / 10
A Seville studio's Kickstarter-funded Metroidvania built from Spanish Holy Week processions and Goya paintings -- still Very Positive on Steam seven years and three free expansions later, with the exact same critic-and-player split that greeted it at launch: some of the best pixel art and atmosphere in the genre, wrapped around movement and combat feel a real share of players never warm to.
7.5 / 10
Koji Igarashi's Kickstarter-funded spiritual successor to Symphony of the Night is still a deep, generously-supported Metroidvania seven years on -- but a December 2025 switch to requiring Epic Online Services has visibly dragged its recent review score down from Very Positive to Mostly Positive.
7.5 / 10
A cosy casino management game whose own defenders say critics judged it by the wrong yardstick — it was never trying to be SimCasino, and the reviewers who wanted a hardcore tycoon sim with real failure states were always going to be disappointed by a game built to be impossible to lose.
5.5 / 10
A charming, cheap cat-run boba tea shop sim that earned a loyal following in its first five months of Early Access, then went quiet — no update since April 2023, no save mid-shift, and a growing pile of reviews from players who love what's there and are giving up waiting for the rest.
6 / 10
A Kickstarter-funded "date your weapons" dungeon crawler from the Moon Hunters team -- Very Positive on Steam for its style, music and genuinely distinctive premise, and shadowed since launch week by a specific, heavily-upvoted complaint that its story talks about consent far more than its mechanics actually practice it.
7 / 10
A promising fusion of FTL, Slay the Spire and Into the Breach that entered Early Access in September 2024 and remains there today, with real balance and RNG-punishment complaints from deeply invested fans set against a genuinely active, recently restructured development push toward a 1.0 launch.
6 / 10
Digital Sun's brick-by-brick fortress-defense strategy game turns "height equals strength" into a genuinely inventive building puzzle wrapped in striking dark fantasy art -- loved by most for exactly that, while a real minority call its systems shallower than the building toy suggests once the campaign's difficulty and pacing settle in.
7.5 / 10
