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.
Cup Dog Games' debut strips the Soulslike down to nothing but boss fights, built around a Focus-and-Mark system that turns every encounter into a duel over who blinks first — and then asks its best players to do the whole thing again without getting hit once.
8 / 10
Jagex takes twenty-five years of RuneScape skill icons and welds them onto a Valheim-shaped survival loop. Fifteen months into Early Access, with a 1.0 date now on the calendar, the question is whether the skilling actually survived the move or just changed clothes.
7.5 / 10
A 2D pixel-art roguelite that pairs jianghu-flavoured build crafting with creature collecting, and five months of steady free patches since its February launch.
7.3 / 10
Orangepixel's turn-based space roguelike gets a time-loop makeover, and the smartest decision it makes is turning "you died" into "you left something behind" instead of "start over."
7.8 / 10
A tile-by-tile spaceship colony sim where you build the hull, route the gas pipes, and keep a crew of civilians fed, breathing, and sane while you search a procedural galaxy for a new home. Reached 1.0 in May 2026 after six years in Early Access.
8 / 10
An auto-battler where you never touch the character directly, animated entirely in ASCII art, and built around Stonescript — a real scripting language for programming your own companion's combat behaviour instead of just watching it fight.
7.5 / 10
Boltray's "Third Way RPG" genuinely earns its hybrid pitch, blending exploration and auto-battle strategy with idle progression, but its skill-gacha economy and paid-only enhancement currency pull hard once the early zones stop carrying you for free.
7 / 10
Erkberg Games' short incremental about washing ash off a dead planet with a rain-cloud and a skill tree — a review of how far a three-hour, five-dollar cozy game can stretch its one good idea before it runs out of road.
7 / 10
A one-purchase incremental about drilling through an entire solar system, planet by planet, where the reward for mastering one resource is a permanent buff instead of a bigger number to stare at.
7.5 / 10
Poncle and Nosebleed Interactive take the cast of a bullet-heaven phenomenon and lock them into turn-based card combat instead. The pivot works far better than it has any right to, right up until the deck-breaking builds that make the genre fun also make the back half of a run trivial.
8 / 10
Read review of Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors
A dungeon crawler that resurrects the original Wizardry's cruelty almost intact, then wraps it in a gacha character-summoning economy that never quite earns the same trust.
7 / 10
A Kickstarter-backed, pro-player-built sci-fi RTS that arrives in Early Access as the most credible StarCraft successor in years, welded to a commander RPG layer that mostly earns its place — if you're still willing to relearn macro from scratch.
7 / 10
A minimalist text-based incremental that spends its first act pretending to be nothing at all, then quietly reveals it was building a survival story out of firewood, huts and silence the whole time.
8 / 10
The best-looking hero-collector on mobile pairs a genuinely thoughtful formation-based combat system with a gacha economy that turns its own leaderboards into the biggest reason to spend.
7 / 10
A classless sandbox MMORPG where every sword, ship and set of plate armour is player-made — and where losing a fight in the wrong zone means losing all of it. Nine years in, and now on Xbox, the question is whether that risk still teaches or just filters.
7.5 / 10
The free browser incremental that codified the modern reset ladder — dimensions into Infinity into Eternity into Reality — and is still the game every other prestige-layer idler is quietly measured against.
9 / 10
Obsidian trades the open world it once pitched for four dense, handcrafted regions of Eora, and the trade mostly pays off — sharp first-person combat and companions with real opinions, wrapped around a plague mystery that resolves faster than it deserves to.
7.5 / 10
LocalThunk's solo-developed poker roguelike turns chips times multiplier into the whole game — a review of how far that one exponential idea carries a run, and where the luck, the repetition and the small-screen text start to push back.
9 / 10
Three years and eight patches after launch, Larian's D&D epic is still the reference point for what "your choices matter" is supposed to mean — and its two real weaknesses, a lopsided third act and a ruleset that rewards system mastery over roleplay, haven't gone anywhere either.
9.5 / 10
A hacking-themed incremental where the automation you'd normally unlock with currency is automation you write yourself, in real JavaScript against a real API — free, open source, and still getting rewritten out from under its own players five years after launch.
8.5 / 10
Game Science builds an entire action RPG around the Destined One's staff and the Great Sage's shapeshifting, and lands one of the best boss rosters in the genre — inside a chapter structure that looks far more open than it actually plays.
8.5 / 10
Blobfish's one-person arena shooter hands a potato six weapon slots and lets stat stacking do the rest — a review of how far chips-in-the-shop decision-making carries a twenty-wave run, and where the plain presentation and a few solved builds hold it back.
8 / 10
A factory-automation colony sim where the terrain itself is a resource — you mine the ground you build on, dump waste that physically piles up, and the island's shape becomes a side effect of every production decision. Four years into Early Access, with two to four more to go by the developer's own estimate.
7.5 / 10
A free time-travel Sokoban puzzler that gets one specific, difficult idea exactly right — solving a puzzle by recording your own past actions and then working alongside the ghost of what you just did.
8.5 / 10
