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 plant shop sim so pleasant that almost nobody has a bad word for it — and so short that the people praising it keep mentioning they finished everything in four hours. Lovely, cheap, and about three systems away from being something you'd still be playing next month.
7 / 10
A slot machine you build synergies into, with rent due every few spins. Players credit it as the game that taught Balatro the trick — and the gap between the two is exactly what its critics complain about.
7.5 / 10
Paint your own body to match the wall you're standing against, then hold still while the seeker walks past. A solo developer's ten-dollar hide-and-seek game has collected 79,000 reviews in eight weeks — and a genuine security story that anyone installing it should read first.
7 / 10
Overhype Studios' turn-based tactical RPG follow-up to the beloved Battle Brothers trades its predecessor's medieval mercenary band for a strike force fighting an unknown threat on a lawless sci-fi frontier — Very Positive on Steam and widely praised as a genuinely fresh spin on the XCOM formula, held back by a specific, restrictive supply system and timed-mission design that fans and critics alike agree feels at odds with careful tactical play.
7.5 / 10
A cat-breeding turn-based tactics roguelite from Binding of Isaac creator Edmund McMillen, nearly a decade in the making — deep, absurd and genuinely inventive enough to draw comparisons to Darkest Dungeon and Sid Meier in the same breath, with real, persistent complaints about breeding tedium and interface friction that a major mid-2026 patch only partly resolved.
8 / 10
A chaotic, genuinely addictive co-op survival game set in a STALKER-flavoured nuclear exclusion zone, praised by players for its dark comedy and bunker-crawling tension even as a substantial share of the same review sample argues its "1.0" label is misleading for content this thin — and whose launch was briefly overshadowed by a real, well-documented DMCA dispute with STALKER 2 developer GSC Game World and an admitted offensive Discord incident from a member of the small development team.
7 / 10
A genuinely well-written, beautifully presented monster-taming JRPG that sits at Mostly Positive on Steam — noticeably lower than the other entries in Capcom's extraordinary 2025-2026 run — because of two real, well-documented problems even its fans agree on: severe launch-window crashing that Capcom itself has confirmed and investigated, and a genuine feature regression from its predecessor, stripping out multiplayer and meaningful endgame content.
7 / 10
A bigger, more mechanically ambitious sequel to one of the deckbuilding roguelike genre's most respected entries, landing at 95% positive on Steam even as a genuinely coherent chorus of the original's most devoted fans argue this expansion came at the cost of what made Monster Train click in the first place.
8 / 10
A budget soulslike built around a genuinely inventive hook — inhabit the bodies of dead warriors rather than levelling a character of your own — that's spent five years since launch as a genuinely divisive game, with real, still-current complaints about content thinness and unfixed bugs sitting alongside a devoted fanbase, just days ahead of a sequel's official release.
7 / 10
The finest medieval battle simulator ever built, wrapped in a sandbox its own fans say is thinner than the 2010 game it replaced. Its most-upvoted negative review is a list of features Warband had and this doesn't.
7.5 / 10
A hundred-and-eighteen-hour median playtime and 92% of recent reviews positive — this is one of the best crafting RPGs anyone has made. It also sells a multiplayer mode with no story in it, and NZ$122 of small DLC on top of a NZ$70 game.
7.5 / 10
A hex-grid roguelike that swaps a conventional deck for a board you draft and build tile by tile, from the maker of the well-regarded mobile hit Cards of Terra — hitting 1.0 to a small but completely unanimous chorus of praise after what several reviewers admit was months of criminally low visibility.
8 / 10
A genuine revival of one of action gaming's most demanding franchises, co-developed by PlatinumGames and Team Ninja, launching to widespread praise for its combat within days of the death of series creator Tomonobu Itagaki — undercut by a real, consistently repeated identity debate among longtime fans over how much of the game feels like Platinum's own house style rather than classic Ninja Gaiden.
7.5 / 10
An ARPG's worth of build synergy packed into an Asteroids cabinet, at thirteen dollars and 96% positive. The one thing standing between it and everybody is the control scheme — and that's a deliberate choice the game is literally named after.
8 / 10
The long-awaited official Steam release of one of indie RPG history's most influential cult classics — a surreal, unsettling 2008 RPG Maker game credited as a direct inspiration for Undertale, Deltarune, Omori and OneShot — undercut for longtime fans by a completely replaced soundtrack, a change with a specific, well-documented and genuinely sympathetic reason behind it.
7.5 / 10
Six years in Early Access, and the 1.0 landed this week. You play a broke shipbreaker with a loan and a flying coffin, building a ship out of salvage one bolt at a time. Nothing else does what it does — and its own most devoted players think it needed another year.
7.5 / 10
A hundred thousand copies in its first week, and deservedly — you play a single parasite tearing organelles out of immune cells and grafting them onto your own body. The best twin-stick roguelite of the year so far, with one genuinely misleading line on its store page.
8.5 / 10
A bold, deliberately alienating reinvention of Ice-Pick Lodge's cult plague-town saga — swapping the survival-sim hunger and infection management longtime fans loved for a time-looping detective mystery — that landed Very Positive on Steam even as a genuine, detailed split opened up among the series' own most devoted players.
7 / 10
A breakout co-op climbing hit from a small Landfall-affiliated team, selling millions of copies for NZ$11.99 and earning genuine, chaotic devotion from its players — briefly overshadowed by a real, well-documented EULA controversy the developers reversed within days, and by two specific, widely repeated complaints (no save option, a punishing difficulty spike) that a remarkably attentive year of patches has since substantively addressed.
8.5 / 10
The game that brought the isometric party RPG back from the dead, and spent a decade being judged against a memory of Baldur's Gate rather than on its own terms. Fewer than half its buyers finish Act I — but the ones who push through average eighty hours.
8 / 10
You brew potions by physically dragging a pestle across a map of alchemical effects, and it's one of the best crafting mechanics anyone has invented. The argument isn't whether it's good — it's whether a brilliant idea that stopped being developed is worth twenty-nine dollars.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely fresh, emotionally resonant sci-fi shoot-and-hack adventure from Capcom, six years after its original 2020 announcement, praised near-universally for its unusual father-daughter bond and inventive combat — undercut for a real, consistently repeated share of the sample by a combat loop that grows repetitive in its back half, and by genuine, well-documented Denuvo DRM access problems affecting even paying, non-piloting players.
8 / 10
Arkane Austin's 2017 immersive sim remains Very Positive across more than 54,000 Steam reviews, widely regarded as one of the genre's finest achievements — a reputation this review can confirm survived the closure of the very studio that made it, when Arkane Austin was shut down entirely by Microsoft in 2024, and a real controversy over the game's own title, which this review can confirm Bethesda forced onto an unrelated story over the objections of Arkane's own founder.
8 / 10
The game that invented the shopkeeper RPG, sixteen years old and still 96% positive. Every buy-low-sell-high game since owes it something — and most of them dropped the one idea that made it work.
8 / 10
