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.
Solo developer Steve Gal's turn-based JRPG follow-up to the Skautfold series lands with a unanimous Positive reception, unusually dense post-launch patching, and one honest catch — it's only the first third of a three-act story that isn't fully funded yet.
7.8 / 10
A short, strikingly atmospheric card-stacking crafting game that reviewers consistently praise for its art, sound and satisfying discovery loop, held back mainly by a brief runtime that leaves many wanting significantly more.
7.5 / 10
A "Risk of Rain, Dead Cells and Borderlands had a baby" FPS roguelite RPG that reviewers overwhelmingly praise for its gunplay and build variety, held back years after launch by stagnant level variety, an unpopular EULA change, and a server relocation that badly hurt latency for large parts of its audience.
7.5 / 10
A cute hamster hiding a genuinely deep puzzle box "HAMSTERMIND" sends the player-controlled Hamster Jones through the rotating rooms of the Pyramid of Charaon, pivoting c
7.6 / 10
Scythe Dev Team's co-op reinvention of its cult-favourite Happy's Humble Burger Farm turns solo fast-food horror into 1-4 player chaos, landing strongly with the friend groups it's built for while its own achievement data confirms a real solo-mode and early-balance rough patch.
7.5 / 10
A NZ$49.95 psychological action-adventure from Ninja Theory that holds Very Positive across roughly 34,000 Steam reviews since August 2017 -- a genuinely landmark portrayal of psychosis built on binaural audio and researched with clinicians and people with lived experience, wrapped around combat and rune-hunting puzzles a large share of its own reviewers, including many who still recommend it, describe as the weakest part of the game.
7.5 / 10
Rogue Snail's dark-fantasy roguelite ARPG reimagines Diablo-style loot-and-build combat through the lens of Brazil's War of Canudos, earning a "Very Positive" reception for its satisfying build variety and combat feel, tempered by static level layouts and a divisive, still-evolving endgame.
7 / 10
Dressage, but you are the one being thrown Hole Your Horses: Champion Edition is a comedy arcade game from Intrusive Thoughts Creative Collective built around a single, absurd prem
7.5 / 10
A free Ace Attorney-style courtroom mystery visual novel starring Hololive English's Myth and Council talents as a high-school detective drama, earning a Very Positive launch reception for its production quality and writing, with reviewers' honest caveats limited to a couple of quickly-patched launch bugs and a deep reliance on Hololive familiarity.
8.5 / 10
A sprawling, text-only interactive fantasy novel from Choice of Games about a secret academy of sorcery, praised for genuinely branching writing but flagged by one vocal reviewer for its handling of politics and identity.
7 / 10
A roguelike "dudebuilder" from Butterscotch Shenanigans that turns a silly internet meme into a genuinely accessible, well-supported autobattler, undercut for a real slice of its audience by a shallow long-run meta and a couple of sharp balance and save-sync complaints.
7.5 / 10
A short, densely written dystopian cyberpunk walking-puzzle in which you have no voice of your own and must survive by collecting and repeating other people's words back at them, praised almost unanimously for its bleak wit and world-building and criticised by a smaller group for opaque, punishing dialogue-choice puzzles.
7.5 / 10
SIDRALGAMES' top-down space shooter builds its entire roguelike loop around a single strange idea — a literal plug hanging off your ship that you must dock into sockets to survive — and the small but enthusiastic review corpus agrees the payoff is worth the unusually steep learning curve required to get there.
7 / 10
French solo developer Charlie Wagner, a technical game designer with prior credits on Under the Waves and Otherskin, delivers a short, wordless 3D platformer built around a single standout traversal mechanic — a hooked staff used to pole-vault, swing and climb through a crumbling underground megastructure — earning overwhelming praise for its movement feel and atmosphere, tempered by a small but specific minority who found its controls inconsistent and its narrative mystery thinner than its Ico and Lorn's Lure comparisons promise.
8 / 10
A physics-based rage-platformer from solo developer SkorpionDev, casting players as a literal coin charging up flips to navigate handcrafted, secret-filled environments, Positive across 44 English reviews with a unanimously enthusiastic reception for its tight controls and rewarding difficulty curve — with a fair complaint that its content, now closed out with a final update, is thin for players who master it quickly.
7 / 10
Buckshot Roulette's chattier cousin "I Have an Item" sits in the small but crowded genre of cheap, party-friendly push-your-luck games that Buckshot Roulette populari
7.2 / 10
A short psychological horror job simulator from solo studio KeeraGames, in which a lonely drive-thru shift doubles as a detective investigation, Positive across 33 reviews — and this review confirmed the developer has since shipped a full Endless Mode directly addressing the base game's most common repetition complaint.
7 / 10
Jimmy Jumps is a retro arcade platformer from small studio Gray Goat Gaming, sending players through 90 hand-crafted levels each with its own dedicated leaderboard, chasing tighter times and hidden movement tech, and this review's unanimously positive sample finds a tightly-focused, nostalgia-driven speedrunning platformer that skipped an achievement system entirely in favor of pure leaderboard chasing.
7.5 / 10
A solo-developed, dice-based RPG that wears its Disco Elysium and Citizen Sleeper influences openly while carving out its own surreal identity, landing a rare unanimous "Very Positive" launch sample split only on whether its short runtime is a strength or a shortfall.
7.5 / 10
A minimalist grid-based arcade roguelike from solo developer Kalinarm that turns four keys and a screen full of psychedelic effects into one of the most addictive "one more run" loops its own reviewers can find, at the literal cost of their wrists.
7.5 / 10
Solo developer Mike Smith, working as one-man studio Elecorn after roughly eight years of on-and-off development, delivers a retro beat-'em-up where every keystroke lands as a combat move, earning warm, specific praise for its charm, accuracy-focused typing design and presentation from a small but nearly unanimous Very Positive review base, tempered by one detailed, harshly critical review disputing both its difficulty and its development history.
7 / 10
A sardonic, nation-scale Cold War in miniature Kiloton casts players as the anonymous steward of an entire nation, managing population, industry, and military doctrine in a minimal
7.5 / 10
Kindergarten traps players in a single, endlessly repeating Monday at a violent, absurdist elementary school, where every character's storyline must be pieced together through trial, error, and death. Reviewers overwhelmingly praise its dark humor and dense writing, but a real minority push back hard on the tedium of repeating the same dialogue to fix a single mistake.
7.5 / 10
Roach Games, a debut studio formed by two real-life janitors who self-funded development for years before a successful 2019 Kickstarter, delivers a lovingly crafted SNES-style JRPG about a world built from garbage, earning some of the year's most enthusiastic comparisons to Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG, undercut for a large and specific share of players by a back half that arrives genuinely unfinished.
7 / 10
![Key art for how to kill a fly [ H2KAF ]](/assets/reviews/how-to-kill-a-fly/hero.webp)
