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 free idle RPG about killing an infinite number of potatoes that turns out to have one of the most patient, best-supported progression systems in the genre, and very little interest in pressuring anyone to pay for it.
7.5 / 10
The second act of the Remake trilogy trades Midgar's corridors for open regions, a deep Synergy-and-Folio combat system and a genuinely excellent card game — then buries a chunk of it under checklist busywork and a PC port that still stutters a year on.
8 / 10
A subscription MMORPG where one character can learn every job in the game, and where the story you're required to sit through before reaching the current patch has grown into a decade-plus commitment. Reviewed with Dawntrail current and patch 7.55 freshly out.
8.5 / 10
A roguelike deckbuilder where your deck is literally the train you've assembled car by car, and every collision on the tactical grid can chain into a fight-ending disaster for whoever's standing in the way.
7.5 / 10
A pencil-drawn tactics RPG where combat plays out on a shared timeline both sides can sabotage, off to a strong start on a tiny early sample and a distinctive hook, with a controller gap and an unproven long game keeping the verdict cautious three days after launch.
7.5 / 10
A decade-old action RPG that just got a real tenth mastery and a third of a new map, proving Crate Entertainment still has more to say — even if the engine underneath it never stopped being from 2016.
8.5 / 10
No subscription, no level-cap treadmill and, fourteen years on, still no level 81 — Guild Wars 2's horizontal progression is either the smartest bet the MMO genre ever made or a slow-burn excuse for six expansions of buy-in. Reviewed with Visions of Eternity live.
8.5 / 10
Supergiant welded a fully voiced, choice-reactive narrative onto the bones of a permadeath roguelite and made death itself the mechanism that moves the story forward — a look at why the original Hades still reads as close to a solved design problem five years and one full sequel later.
9 / 10
Chasing Carrots dressed a Vampire Survivors loop in Diablo's dark isometric skin and then buried it under one of the deepest meta-progression trees the survivor-like genre has — a review of what that unlock grind buys you, and what happens to the screen once it pays off.
8 / 10
A genuinely impressive Unreal Engine 5 remake of the campaign that built a franchise, shipped with one enormous, deliberate omission — every scrap of the multiplayer that kept people playing the original for twenty years.
7 / 10
Orna's class-and-gear rulebook, unplugged from GPS and pinned to a handcrafted continent instead. The systems survive the transplant; the thing that made its sibling famous doesn't.
7 / 10
A paid idle RPG that piles five separate game modes, 125+ powers and a full forging-and-prestige stack onto a post-apocalyptic hero — genuinely deep for the genre, but still working out UI bugs and an overwhelming opening hour a month after launch.
7 / 10
A side-scrolling idle RPG that dares to make its active layer matter — timing jumps through coin trails pays out far more than watching the run play itself, right up until the moment you close the app and the game quietly goes back to being a spreadsheet.
7.5 / 10
A 2019 Steam idle-RPG where the class you pick isn't a build for life — it's a costume you're expected to change every run, and the game is built to make that swapping the whole point.
7.5 / 10
A free browser idler from 2014 that outgrew Kongregate, landed on Steam in 2016, and has spent over a decade turning shadow clones and god fights into one of the genre's longest and most demanding progression ladders.
7 / 10
A minimalist incremental where every life is a countdown to a death that actually matters — the queue you plan, the story chapter you're on, and the instincts you've earned all carry forward, right up until the game itself stopped moving forward three years ago.
7 / 10
Warhorse Studios' medieval simulation grows up without losing its stubbornness — a sequel that fixes the first game's roughest edges while doubling down on the idea that realism should cost you something. The result is one of the most complete RPGs of the last few years, provided you're willing to let a swordfight or a bowl of stew go badly.
8.5 / 10
A free browser incremental that hides its difficulty in storage caps and the calendar rather than big numbers — you are never fighting an enemy in Kittens Game, you are fighting your own granary.
8 / 10
A brutal, hand-crafted top-down shooter that asks you to think in Hotline Miami's language of parries and one-hit deaths, then backs it with fifty-four stages that never repeat a trick twice.
8 / 10
The action RPG that turned build crafting into something you can actually read and steer — fifteen masteries, a specialization tree on every skill, and deterministic crafting — held back by a campaign nobody replays and an endgame that runs out of new ideas before you do.
8 / 10
A joke about blowing leaves off a lawn that grew, update by update, into one of Steam's biggest free incrementals — dozens of interlocking systems, five years of support, and a DLC list that doesn't always match the "no paywall" pitch.
7.5 / 10
A Belle Époque retelling of Pinocchio that wears its Bloodborne influence on its sleeve, then earns the comparison with a weapon-assembly system and a guard-timing mechanic good enough to stand on their own.
8 / 10
A deckbuilding auto-battler where the hero fights entirely on their own and the only real decisions are which terrain cards to lay down along the loop, and when to stop being greedy and walk the loot home.
8.5 / 10
Smilegate RPG's isometric action MMO still has the best raid encounter design the genre has produced, and still asks players to climb a honing ladder brutal enough that Amazon is now shipping a way to skip most of it. Reviewed as the Western service heads into an August 2026 server merge.
7 / 10
