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 grief-soaked open-world deckbuilder that fuses Into the Breach-style grid tactics with a real card-building game rather than a roguelike run-reset, undercut for some players by a region system that keeps tearing down the deck they just built.
7.5 / 10
A wordless, gorgeously atmospheric narrative platformer about a runaway boy and the fawn he befriends, with real emotional power for many players, held back by simple puzzles and platforming that borrows heavily from its genre predecessors without quite matching them.
7 / 10
Resolution Games follows up its VR tactical RPG Demeo with an officially licensed Dungeons & Dragons crossover, earning enthusiastic, specific praise for its card-based combat, presentation and VR immersion from a Very Positive review base, while a detailed and heavily repeated launch-window complaint about single-player character leveling became the corpus's two single most-voted reviews before developers substantially addressed it in a post-launch patch.
7 / 10
A puzzle-precise tactics RPG wrapped around a Persona-flavoured school-life sim, whose Into the Breach-style combat and Saturn-era art and music land far more consistently than its tonally uneven writing, after four separate delays finally got it out the door.
7.5 / 10
Undercoders' train-skating action game welds Tony Hawk-style trick combos and Jet Set Radio's graffiti-punk aesthetic onto a runaway commuter train, and the community's near-unanimous verdict is that the absurd premise works — a colourful, endlessly musical arcade rush that a small minority bounce off hard once the control scheme stops clicking.
8.5 / 10
A budget solo-developer roguelike JRPG built as a spiritual successor to Lufia II's beloved Ancient Cave dungeon — turn-based, deliberately brutal, and built entirely around a single risk/reward decision repeated a hundred floors deep, with a small but unanimously enthusiastic review sample of longtime Ancient Cave fans thrilled it finally has a proper standalone game.
7 / 10
An idle detective RPG that sits in a small, customisable window in the corner of your screen while you work or play other games, drawing an early Very Positive reception for its charming art, low CPU footprint and deep loot-and-build hunting, tempered by a substantial minority of reviewers who argue its rebirth and ascension loop demands far more constant attention than a true idler should.
7 / 10
Recurring Dream's found-PC mystery hands players a dead relative's old computer and a fictional puzzle game buried inside it, and turns a 90s desktop metaphor into one of the year's most quietly devastating narrative puzzle games — even as its back half loses some of the precision that made its opening hours so compelling.
8 / 10
Detective Beebo: Night at the Mansion is a point-and-click mystery romcom from solo developer Bwobbers, adapted from their own webcomic, in which Detective Oliver Beebo investigates a strange dinner party while an unwanted romance and a time-loop mystery unfold around him, and this review's sample finds an enthusiastically-received blend of comedy, horror, and queer romance held together by a distinctive personal voice.
7.5 / 10
Armonica, a four-person American studio that reunited over a shared love of Japanese adventure games during the pandemic, delivers a lovingly crafted debut mystery visual novel that earns strong comparisons to Famicom Detective Club and Ace Attorney, tempered by a consistent, specific complaint that its command-select detecting offers players too little real agency over how the mystery unfolds.
7 / 10
Deukdo Beat is a Korean rhythm-action game from small studio Deukdo Games that casts players as a monk striking down evil spirits arriving from all eight compass directions, splitting input between WASD for cardinal enemies and arrow keys for diagonal ones, and this review's overwhelmingly positive translated sample and unusually transparent post-launch patch history find a genuinely well-crafted, actively supported small release with one divisive mid-game gimmick.
7 / 10
A solo-developed dice-and-card roguelike that trades card-draw scarcity for a reroll-your-luck economy, delivering real per-hero build variety across a tight three-chapter campaign that several reviewers found ran out of new ideas within a few hours.
7.3 / 10
A tactical roguelike that fuses the physical dexterity of Crokinole with fantasy hero recruitment and campaign-based artifact building, winning over a tiny early review base with genuine strategic depth in how disc abilities interact, though the sample so far is too small and uniformly glowing to say much about where the game might still fall short.
7.5 / 10
A disc golf simulation built by and for actual disc golfers, praised across the board for physics and course-reading depth that longtime players describe as unmatched in the genre, held back at Early Access launch by thin course content and an always-online requirement even for solo play.
7 / 10
A narrative-heavy tactical RPG about exploring a sprawling, mysterious castle full of locked doors and deterministic robot-enemy encounters, earning enthusiastic praise for its hand-drawn art, sci-fi mystery story and puzzle-like combat, while a real, recurring minority of reviewers find its trial-and-error fights and backtracking-to-heal structure genuinely tedious.
7.5 / 10
BornMonkie's 2D/3D perspective-switching puzzle-platformer about a quacking, hat-collecting duck lands "Positive" on the strength of one genuinely clever mechanic and a cozy, meme-friendly charm, held back by uneven difficulty spikes and a few post-launch platforming bugs.
8 / 10
A tiny, cheap 3D survival-choice game about outlasting the ocean after your ship sinks, drawing heavy and openly acknowledged inspiration from 60 Seconds! but replacing its text-and-still-image format with fully animated consequences — praised by reviewers for atmosphere and replayability, held back mainly by thin content and English-only text.
7 / 10
A narrative turn-based RPG about two estranged sisters fighting a fast-food empire with a cooking-powered spirit-mech, where reviewers agree almost unanimously that the story and characters carry the game far more than its combat does.
7.4 / 10
A free, roughly 15-to-30-minute student game from BYU's Center for Animation in which a rooster bard must romance, not slay, the dragon attacking his village through a soulslike-structured boss fight built around rhythm minigames — praised widely for its animation and music, held back by real jank in controls, audio mixing, and menu polish.
7 / 10
A genuinely deep, addictive squad-building card roguelike with suggestive monster-girl art, let down almost entirely by a severely incomplete English translation that reviewers name more than any other flaw.
7 / 10
A small five-person team led by former Thunderful game director Sebastian Larsson delivers a tiny, SteamWorld Dig-inspired digging platformer about a bird drilling for ore to hatch its egg, earning warm, near-universal praise for its charm, sound design and tightly designed one-hour loop, tempered by a consistent, honest debate within its own review base over whether that length justifies its price.
7 / 10
A roguelike dungeon crawler built around a genuinely distinctive "tipsiness" resource system layered on top of dice-roll skill checks, following a perpetually drunk rogue and a vampire seeking her ailing father, whose approachable early game hides a brutally demanding New Game Plus and hardest-difficulty mode that almost no reviewer has actually cleared.
7 / 10
A fast, snappy Wizardry-meets-Final-Fantasy-V dungeon crawler that reviewers overwhelmingly love for its job-mastery system and lean, no-nonsense design, tempered by a punishing late-game death penalty and a handful of balance and interface rough edges.
8 / 10
A solo-developed puzzle-platformer that channels Wario Land and La-Mulana through three swappable heroines, backed by a genuinely exceptional accessibility feature set and a rapid, transparent, first-person patch cadence.
7.8 / 10
