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.
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
A third-person roguelite where every pickup multiplies the last one while a fixed difficulty clock keeps climbing underneath you — number-go-up design wearing a shooter's clothes. Reviewed against the game's full history, including the DLC launch Gearbox itself admitted put the PC version "in a really bad place," and the year it took to fix.
8 / 10
Jagex's other MMO — the modernised main game running alongside Old School RuneScape on the same account — trades 2007's frozen ruleset for ability combat, twenty-nine skills and a microtransaction history it spent 2026 trying to walk back.
7.5 / 10
An automation game solved in three dimensions instead of two, where every belt run is something you physically walked and every ratio problem is also an architecture problem. Five years after leaving Epic exclusivity, its 1.0 release confirms it was worth the wait.
9 / 10
A decade in Early Access ends with Drilling Thunder, a genuinely substantial 1.0 update that finally gives Scrap Mechanic's celebrated building physics a full story campaign — while leaving the host-dependent multiplayer that has bugged players since 2016 exactly as it was.
8 / 10
Sabotage Studio's turn-based RPG borrows Chrono Trigger's parts openly and reassembles them well — timed hits, a lock-breaking combat layer and a day/night mechanic that actually changes puzzles — but the writing never catches up to the systems around it.
8.5 / 10
