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.
Fifteen years past release, the hardest part of reviewing Minecraft isn't judging whether it's good — it's telling a new buyer which of its two incompatible engines to actually install, and being honest about what stopped changing while the block count kept climbing.
9 / 10
A decade-long Early Access project finally becomes a finished game, and it's still the only MMORPG where getting cursed into a cow is a legitimate build.
7.5 / 10
A turn-based extraction roguelike where every mercenary is a disposable clone, every mission can end in a single unlucky turn, and the cosmic horror waiting beneath the corporate PMC contracts is exactly as unforgiving as the combat.
8 / 10
An idle farming sim that gave up on being a game you look at, and became the desktop companion the whole genre now copies — charming and honest about its own smallness, if a little thin once the farm is built out.
8.5 / 10
A top-down action-roguelite from the studio behind Dungreed, built around a Tetris-style artifact inventory that turns loadout planning into its own puzzle game — dense, generous with content, and let down late by a damage-sponge final boss and a steep endgame DPS wall.
8 / 10
A dark fantasy RPG that replaces turns and mana with a shared deck and a countdown clock — every card you play buys time against the enemy's next move, and every hero draws from the same pool of cards.
7.5 / 10
A dead adventurer comes back as a skeleton shopkeep and starts hiring the living to die in his place — Xtonomous's solo-developed idle sim turns that morbid joke into a genuinely connected hire-loot-sell loop, then keeps things deliberately short instead of chasing the usual idle-game grind.
7.5 / 10
A pixel-art dungeon crawler where a slot machine decides what's waiting on every floor — enemies, loot and spells all drawn as reel symbols you then have to walk up to and fight, not wager on. Distinctive, generous with content, and rougher around the edges than its 1.0 label suggests.
7 / 10
A free turn-based idle dungeon crawler that bolts Clicker Heroes-style ascension onto a tavern full of soda-fuelled adventurers, charming enough that thousands of players still recommend it a decade after it started life as a mobile game.
7 / 10
The mobile gacha RPG that the rest of the genre was quietly built on top of is still running twelve years later, and the direct ancestry to Raid: Shadow Legends' gear system makes it the rare case where reviewing the original after the imitation actually changes the verdict.
7 / 10
A shipwrecked hero levels up by winning minigames, not by clicking through menus. SoulGame Studio's sequel to its cult flash hit turns stat training into the whole game, and that idea is both the best and most exhausting thing about it.
7.5 / 10
An automation game that skips the usual pretend-programming abstractions and just hands you a Python-shaped scripting language, then asks you to actually write the loops and functions that run your farm. The rare "learn to code" game that works as a game first.
8.5 / 10
A build-crafting incremental about small creatures smashing a rock for wealth, where the usual "number always goes up" comfort is replaced by permanent choices that can genuinely sabotage a run.
8 / 10
Nineteen years old and still the only MMO that treats Tolkien's geography and timeline as a design constraint rather than a skin. Reviewed with Kingdoms of Harad current, asking what that licence discipline actually buys a player in 2026 — and what a new one genuinely has to pay to see it.
7 / 10
A free browser incremental whose entire subject is the prestige mechanic other incrementals treat as scaffolding — thirty-one reset layers stacked on top of each other, and the accidental parent of a modding framework that a very long tail of hobbyist developers have since built their own games on.
7 / 10
A solo developer's follow-up to Magic Archery swaps archery for architecture, building an incremental around growing a single wizard's tower toward a definite, well-earned ending rather than an infinite number-go-up treadmill.
8 / 10
A tactical fantasy RPG where you never actually give a combat order — you write a standing set of instructions for each unit and then watch your army carry them out, which makes it one of the closest things a big-budget console release has come to an automation game.
8 / 10
A solo developer's debut that welds an automated turret to a twin-stick Asteroids clone, then closes the whole arc out in an afternoon — a sharp, cheap hook let down by a mouse-hostile upgrade screen and a progression curve that peaks right as the credits roll.
7 / 10
A survival-crafting game with action-RPG combat and a boss list instead of a tech tree, built around a PvP fantasy that most of its players quietly opt out of. Two years past 1.0, with the studio now calling it content-complete, it's worth being precise about which version of this game you're actually signing up for.
8 / 10
A god-game sandbox where civilizations of humans, orcs, elves and dwarves grow, fight and collapse almost entirely on their own while you throw lightning, plagues and dragons at them. Nearly five years into Steam Early Access, it's still one of the most purely enjoyable toyboxes in PC gaming — as long as you never expected it to have an ending.
8 / 10
Reviewed with Midnight, the eleventh expansion, current and Season 2 landing this month. A look at what a subscriber actually gets in 2026 — the onboarding path, the sub-plus-shop-plus- expansion cost stack, and whether two decades of accumulated systems still add up to a game worth the monthly fee.
7.5 / 10
Kuro Games' answer to Genshin Impact swaps careful elemental chemistry for a faster, parry-driven combo system and a stamina-free traversal kit — and two years of patches have turned a rocky, heavily-criticised launch into one of Steam's best-reviewed live-service action RPGs. The question this review actually answers is what that trade costs you.
7.5 / 10
A Tamagotchi-raising sim welded onto an idle RPG, charming in exactly the way its premise promises and shallow in exactly the way that premise risks — the hero grows on its own, but you rarely get to decide how.
7.5 / 10
HoYoverse's third live-service RPG throws out the open world entirely and bets everything on combat — parries, dodge counters and three-character chain attacks that reward real execution rather than a stat sheet. The review is about whether that trade is worth what the mission structure and the story pacing cost you.
7.5 / 10
