ANIMAL WELL
One person spent seven years building a pixel-perfect puzzle box with secrets buried so deep the playerbase had to solve the last of them collectively — and never added key rebinding, which is still its most-upvoted complaint.
8.5 / 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
Apex Legends
The best movement in any shooter, and a playerbase that turned on it — 85 of its hundred most-helpful negative reviews were written from 2024 onward, by players averaging 696 hours each.
7 / 10
Archon Soul
A hand-illustrated roguelike deckbuilder that swaps cards for dice — you don't collect relics so much as permanently rebuild the six faces of your own dice — landing close enough to Slay the Spire and Dicey Dungeons that its own reviewers keep naming both games unprompted.
7.5 / 10
ARC Raiders
A gorgeous, brilliantly-made extraction shooter that sold 16 million copies and then spent nine months watching its own community turn hostile — with the developers now matchmaking players by how likely they are to shoot you.
7.5 / 10
Arma 3
A landmark, endlessly moddable military sandbox still going strong 13 years on — now facing a fresh, well-documented 2026 backlash after Bohemia Interactive introduced a monthly subscription pass for a game whose community has spent over a decade keeping it alive largely on its own.
8 / 10
ASTRONEER
A beloved co-op space-building sandbox with three distinct eras in its review history — an adored Early Access, a 1.0 launch derailed by an EULA backlash that had nothing to do with the game, and a 2025 wave of long-term fans warning newcomers about DLC and premium currency arriving after a "strategic acquisition."
7.5 / 10
Barotrauma
A submarine survival-horror sim where the alien monsters outside are rarely the reason a run ends badly — its own review corpus is unusually consistent that the biggest threat is the crew, whether through griefing, incompetence, or seven years of accumulated engine jank.
7.5 / 10
BeamNG.drive
Eleven years in Early Access, 97.6% positive across 223,161 English reviews, and a graphics overhaul eight days old that has upset a loud minority without moving the score at all.
8.5 / 10
Big Walk
A co-op game about walking and talking with friends, from the Untitled Goose Game studio — shipped two days ago without a separate voice volume slider, so half its reviews are the same polite request written 1,400 different ways.
7.5 / 10
Birds of War
A team-based aerial PvP game about birds stealing each other's eggs, built around always-on proximity voice chat — genuinely loved by a fast-growing fanbase who call it the real version of a beloved internet meme, while a real, well-corroborated matchmaking and toxicity problem threatens to shrink the population it depends on.
7 / 10
Bloodmoon Survivors
A horde-survival roguelite that makes you actually fight, forcing constant swaps between melee and ranged weapons against enemies built to resist whichever one you're not holding — a deliberate answer to the genre's reputation for playing itself.
7.5 / 10
Bloons TD 6
One of the best-reviewed games on Steam, and the one whose critics have played it for a median of 254 hours — because the people angriest about where it's heading are the ones who never put it down.
8.5 / 10
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
A gorgeous, funky Jet Set Radio successor that 97.8% of players love — and whose critics land the same blow every time: it understood that the original was cool without understanding why.
8 / 10
Bonehold
A 3D roguelike ARPG dungeon crawler with ten character classes and a distinctive hand-painted-meets-pixel-art look — well liked a week into launch, with real, repeated complaints about shallow combat and a genuinely unusual design choice: no mid-run save system at all.
7 / 10
Boneraiser Minions
A gothic, minion-summoning take on the Vampire Survivors-style bullet-heaven, built and continuously expanded by a solo developer whose dedication reviewers single out almost as often as the game itself — with one consistent, legitimate complaint about visual clarity in busy fights.
8 / 10
Bongo Cat
A free cat that drums your taskbar every time you press a key — 107,572 reviews at 96.6%, 5.8 million downloads in year one by the developer's own count, and an achievement ladder that climbed to 25 million bongos and broke its own completionists.
7.5 / 10
BOOK OF HOURS
An atmospheric, deliberately opaque occult-librarian sim from the Cultist Simulator team — genuinely singular writing and world-building, wrapped around a learning curve so steep and under-explained that a large share of its own reviewers describe needing external spreadsheets just to keep up.
7 / 10
Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling
The Paper Mario game a huge share of its own reviewers say Nintendo stopped making — turn-based RPG combat, real puzzle-solving abilities, genuine charm — built by a small independent team instead, and rarely called out for anything beyond a handful of specific, old-school JRPG design choices.
8.5 / 10
Cassette Beasts
An open-world monster-taming RPG whose fusion system — combining any two monster forms into a unique creature with its own hand-drawn sprite — has become its signature achievement, built by a two-person team and beloved for exactly that kind of ambition.
8 / 10
Celeste
A precision platformer about climbing a mountain while depressed, built on one of the genre's most respected Assist Mode implementations — and still, honestly, brutally hard for a meaningful slice of the players who bounce off it.
9 / 10
Chef Knight
A dungeon-crawling incremental where the monsters are also the ingredients — charming, tightly made, and finished by most of the people who buy it in a single sitting, for better and for worse.
7 / 10
Cloud Keeper: Shrine of Dal
A Korean-folklore-themed bullet-heaven roguelite that entered Early Access after roughly two and a half years of private playtesting, already showing unusually confident art direction and a distinctive cultural setting — with one concrete, currently reported performance issue around its dash mechanic.
7.5 / 10
Cobalt Core
A charming, tightly designed card-battler with a genuinely novel single-axis spaceship positioning system, whose own most-upvoted reviews — positive and negative alike — converge on the same honest complaint: not quite enough content or variety to sustain long-term mastery.
7.5 / 10
Control Ultimate Edition
A visually stunning, richly written supernatural action game widely called a Remedy highlight — with a genuinely well-documented 2021 "Ultimate Edition without the Ultimate DLC" controversy, and a still-unresolved oddity for a single-player game requiring an internet connection just to launch.
7.5 / 10