Farm RPG
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
The Wanderer reading room
Game Reviews
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.
Browse the reviews
Final Fantasy XVI
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
Granblue Fantasy: Relink
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
Grounded
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
Mabinogi
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
Moonlighter
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
Nioh 2 – The Complete Edition
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
Noita
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
Octopath Traveler II
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
Persona 5 Royal
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
shapez
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
Songs of Syx
A city builder that abandons the colonist as its unit of decision and manages a population instead — tens of thousands of citizens, an empire beyond the walls, and an interface that makes you earn every bit of that scale.
7.5 / 10
Star Wars: The Old Republic
Eight fully voice-acted BioWare RPGs wearing an MMO's clothing, fifteen years on and still the best argument for that structure the genre has ever produced. Reviewed with Update 7.9 "Legacy Reborn" current and 8.0 on the public test server.
7.5 / 10
Stuck In Time
A NZ$10.29 fusion of time-loop adventure and idle incremental that has held a Very Positive Steam rating across four and a half years — not by avoiding friction, but by turning the loop's reset into the exact mechanism that makes idle progression permanent, while never fixing the one interface complaint players have repeated since launch week.
7 / 10
Subnautica
An open-world survival game that strips out weapons almost entirely and replaces them with an oxygen gauge, a sound cue you can't place, and a lot of very dark water. Eight years after full release, it's still the best argument that dread works better than a sword.
9 / 10
Theory of Magic
A free browser idle-RPG about running a wizard's lair that quietly became one of the genre's most influential designs, then got left behind by its own creator and kept alive since by a scattered handful of fans.
7 / 10
Timberborn
A city builder where the antagonist isn't a raid or a monster roster but a drought timer, and every dam, canal and reservoir you build is really an answer to a scheduling problem. Beavers are the theme; water is the game.
8 / 10
Titan Quest
The 2006 Diablo alternative that swapped gothic horror for Greek, Egyptian and Asian mythology, revisited twenty years on through the Anniversary Edition that's now the only way to buy it.
7.5 / 10
Vintage Story
A voxel survival sandbox that replaces Minecraft's tap-a-block-get-an-ingot logic with real material science — knapping, pit kilns, bloomeries and alloy ratios you actually have to measure — sold direct from the developer for one flat price with no storefront in between.
8.4 / 10
Against the Storm
A city builder that refuses to let any settlement become permanent, banking what you learn into a roguelite meta-progression layer instead. It is one of the only games in its genre to treat the endgame as a design problem worth solving rather than a state to reach and stop.
8.5 / 10
Ages of Conflict: World War Simulator
A hands-off map simulator where you paint borders, spawn AI-controlled nations and then watch them conquer, ally, revolt and collapse across thousands of simulated years. The scenario tools and Steam Workshop are genuinely excellent; the combat resolution underneath them is close to a coin flip, and that undercuts the "simulator" the title promises.
7 / 10
Almost a Hero
A party of the world's most useless heroes carries a fairly ordinary idle RPG through sheer force of writing, while its rewarded-video-ad economy is honest enough about what it's selling that the comparison to gacha idlers actually favours it.
7.5 / 10
Arknights
A tower-defense puzzle wearing gacha-RPG clothes, where the placement grid matters more than the banner history — and where the sanity bar, not the wallet, is the thing actually managing your time.
8.5 / 10
Bills Must Be Paid
A stamina-gated piggy-bank smasher that turns an anxious premise — debt collectors, deadlines, a hand that gets tired — into one of the tightest, funniest short incrementals on Steam, even if the skill tree runs out of ideas well before the hammer does.
8 / 10