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.
Widely regarded as the best-written game in the Fallout series, and just as widely known for crashing constantly — a reputation so baked into its identity that even its own fans write songs about the bugs in five-star reviews, fifteen years on.
9 / 10
A chaotic, systemically fun open-world shooter set against an American cult uprising — increasingly reviewed less on its own merits than on a 2025 Ubisoft EULA change that reviewers say gives the publisher the right to revoke access to games players already paid for.
7 / 10
A deep, genuinely meditative agricultural sim that reviewers describe finding real therapeutic value in — held back for years by the same specific, franchise-wide complaint about hired-worker AI, and a biennial release cycle some longtime fans feel delivers too little new for the price.
7.5 / 10
A spectacular retelling of the first five hours of a 1997 classic, stretched to forty — and a PC port whose launch grievances have quietly been fixed while the argument about the story hasn't gone anywhere.
8 / 10
A NZ$7.19 fishing idler that lives along the bottom of your screen, updated relentlessly for a year — and whose 26 English critics mostly object that an idle game shouldn't need watching.
7.5 / 10
A Pomodoro-technique productivity companion disguised as an idle weapon-forging desktop pet — finish a focus session, a blacksmith maiden finishes a weapon, and you both work toward her freedom — loved so far by an almost entirely Chinese-speaking early audience.
7.5 / 10
Quite possibly the best arcade racer ever made, set in the best map the series has built — and its two most-upvoted negative reviews are from people who couldn't play it because they block telemetry.
7.5 / 10
1.25 million reviews, twenty years old, still patched in 2026 — and its negative column is a museum of arguments from 2013 to 2015, while the one live complaint isn't about the game at all.
8.5 / 10
A conventional open-world checklist game wearing the most beautiful presentation layer in the genre — and, after Sony's reported retreat from PC in March 2026, quite possibly the last Sucker Punch game PC players get to buy.
8.5 / 10
A near-universally acclaimed reinvention of the series into a slower, more personal Norse epic — praised almost unanimously, with an honest, considered minority of longtime original-series fans who miss the classic combat, and a real, recurring Steam Deck "Verified" labeling problem tied to a documented memory leak.
9 / 10
A widely acclaimed single-player crime saga bundled with an online mode whose 2017-2018 wrongful-ban epidemic became one of the most documented anti-cheat fairness disputes on Steam — improved since, but echoed by a related complaint that persists into 2024-2025.
7.5 / 10
Klei Entertainment's deck-building roguelite wraps card combat and card-based negotiation around real narrative choice — praised widely for its writing and world, while a consistent, thoughtful minority argue the cards underneath don't hold up to the genre's best.
7 / 10
A free roguelike RPG port of a long-running mobile game — with the microtransactions stripped out, a year of updates its own reviewers said would never come, and only 49 English reviews to judge it by.
7 / 10
A hand-drawn boss-rush action game whose bosses grow stronger based on the order you fight them — reviewed against a 239-review corpus, an achievement curve that confirms just how brutal the ending really is, and a single dominant complaint that crosses five languages.
7.5 / 10
Supergiant's first-ever sequel splits its roguelite loop into two directions instead of one, hands Melinoë a mana bar to manage on top of her dash, and asks you to keep three separate meta-progression tracks fed at once — an ambitious redesign that mostly earns its scope. It also shipped a 1.0 ending that triggered a real backlash, one Supergiant is still visibly patching a response to nine months later.
8.5 / 10
Still the best case anyone has made for virtual reality, six years on — 98.3% positive, and the loudest criticism on its store page is a launch-day review that says "in its current state".
9 / 10
A gorgeously styled action roguelike casting you as an overworked Death cleaning house on a rogue corporate afterlife, whose Early Access growing pains have mostly faded — leaving a more current, specific complaint about late-game difficulty spikes and level variety in their place.
7 / 10
A solo developer's early-2000s-styled horror PvP and co-op shooter, framed as a cursed childhood game whose servers mysteriously reopened — reviewed on a complete, entirely positive 25-review sample spanning English and a notably large Spanish-speaking fanbase.
8 / 10
The 2017 original that the whole modern metroidvania wave points back to. Nine years on it still sells on reputation alone — and the reputation holds up, with one honest asterisk.
9 / 10
Fourteen years on, still one of the most influential action games ever made — and its most-upvoted negative review is really just a warning label its own fans agree with.
9 / 10
A decade-old physics-puzzle co-op favorite still getting free content updates today — and still, nearly a decade later, drawing a specific, sustained complaint from Linux owners about a 2018 platform decision that's never been reversed or clearly explained.
8 / 10
A gorgeous, unusually faithful Indiana Jones game with excellent puzzles — and hardware requirements strict enough that its second most-upvoted critic warns you'll discover the problem after the refund window closes.
7.5 / 10
A zombie-apocalypse colony builder with a genuinely singular hook — using real-world map data to let you fortify your own actual neighbourhood — that's spent more than two years in Early Access with the same recurring complaints, about squad micromanagement and interruption pop-ups, still surfacing in this week's reviews.
7 / 10
Zachtronics in three dimensions, and the one its own siblings' reviewers keep calling fun — except it rates below them, costs the most, and its critics say it isn't the factory game the name implies.
7.5 / 10
