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 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
A one-person, text-first incremental about running a school of wizards that keeps almost everything on a single screen of menus, and turns dying to a boss into the moment its retirement system finally starts paying off.
7.5 / 10
The sequel keeps the first game's text-only school-of-magic formula intact and pours the budget into scope instead — a bigger spell list, a crew of Wizards you can delegate to, and a familiar system that splits its own fanbase down the middle.
8 / 10
A RuneScape skilling menu stripped of everything else and rebuilt as a proper idle RPG — twenty-nine interlocking skills, a free version that isn't a trial, and three expansions that never once ask for a subscription.
8.5 / 10
A fantasy JRPG from the Persona 5 team that turns an election campaign into a turn-based RPG's core loop, built around a class system deep enough to carry the whole eighty-hour runtime and a calendar that never lets you forget the clock is running.
8.5 / 10
A factory game where your conveyor belts double as your ammo supply, so a bottleneck in copper isn't a spreadsheet problem, it's a hole in your wall. Free and open source on Android and itch.io, a paid one-off on Steam, and one of the most distinctive marriages of automation and tower defence around.
8 / 10
Capcom's biggest Monster Hunter yet strips away almost everything that used to make the series hard to love — and a lot of what used to make it worth loving. A phenomenal hunt loop wrapped around a launch-year PC performance crisis and an endgame that shipped thinner than the marketing suggested.
7.5 / 10
Capcom's breakout entry turned a niche Japanese series into a global phenomenon by making its hardest lesson — learn the monster, not the menu — finally worth teaching. Eight years on, the hunt loop still holds up better than almost anything that copied it, even if the gear ladder's endgame RNG and a genuinely obtuse multiplayer system haven't gone anywhere.
8.5 / 10
A free browser idler that grew into one of Steam's most respected incrementals by refusing to explain itself, stacking rebirth systems on rebirth systems until a wiki tab stops being optional and starts being furniture.
8.5 / 10
Moon Studios spent over two years turning a thin, contentious Early Access launch into a nearly complete game — hand-painted world, precision souls-like combat, a real town to build up, and co-op that only actually arrived in January 2026 — with the full 1.0 release now dated for October 2026.
7.5 / 10
Hotta Studio's follow-up to Tower of Fantasy trades sci-fi towers for a neon-lit supernatural city, and the open world it built to fill that city is a genuinely bigger achievement than the parry-and-dash combat sitting inside it.
7 / 10
A 2007 client kept alive by its players since 2013 — every update to Old School RuneScape has to survive a supermajority vote, and that single rule shapes everything else about how the game feels seventeen years on.
8.5 / 10
A genuinely deep classic RPG — classes, tiers, kingdoms, raids — welded to your actual street map. The system is real; how much of it you see depends on your postcode.
7.5 / 10
A space-colony simulation where the number that scales isn't a character level — it's the tangle of pipes, wires and thermal gradients you're personally responsible for keeping alive, and the game never once lets physics take a day off.
8.5 / 10
A demon-infested crusade that hands out nine ways to stop being human, wrapped around the most tabletop-faithful, least newcomer-friendly ruleset the CRPG revival has shipped — and a strategic army layer a large share of its own audience wishes it could turn off.
7.5 / 10
Grinding Gear Games' original 2013 action RPG is still running, still free, and still adding a full seasonal league every few months — a genre-defining build sandbox that never bothered making itself easy to learn, now sharing a studio and a wallet with its own sequel.
8.5 / 10
Grinding Gear Games rebuilt combat around commitment and rhythm instead of clear speed, redrew the passive tree and skill-gem system from the ground up, and is still rebuilding the endgame around them nineteen months into Early Access — a genre-defining campaign wrapped around systems that are still visibly under construction.
8 / 10
A free browser incremental where the resource you're actually optimising is your character's lifespan — age through a job and skill web, die at seventy unless you've trained around it, and rebirth into a faster run. Small in scope next to the genre's marathons, and handed to the community as public domain, which explains why it's been forked well over a hundred times.
7 / 10
A 2015 Kongregate clicker that grew into one of the incremental genre's most durable idle RPGs by making its faction choice actually change how you play, not just which number gets bigger.
7.5 / 10
A free bullet-hell MMO that's been asking the same brutal question for fourteen years — how far will you push a character you can never get back — and somehow still gets away with graphics that looked deliberately retro even in 2012.
7.5 / 10
A colony sim that treats the AI storyteller, not the tech tree, as the main system — every skill point your colonists earn is really just raising the stakes for the disaster it's about to send you. Seven years and five expansions after 1.0, the total price of owning everything has become one of the review's own subjects.
9 / 10
