The Wanderer reading room

Game Reviews

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.

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INSIDE

A haunting, wordless puzzle-platformer from the makers of Limbo, whose ending has divided players in exactly the same way for nearly a decade — not through controversy, but through a deliberate ambiguity some find profound and others find frustrating.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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Into the Breach

FTL's creators followed up randomness with certainty — a tiny, perfect-information tactics puzzle where every enemy move is telegraphed in advance. Most players call the trade a triumph; a consistent minority of FTL fans still feel the resentment the top positive review admits to feeling at first.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

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It Consumes

A one-day-old arena shooter played almost entirely in the dark, where a pulsing heartbeat is your only light source — reviewed on a genuinely complete sample of its first sixteen reviews, every single one of them positive.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Jagged Alliance 3

The first genuine successor to a beloved 1999 tactics classic in over two decades — a competent, often very good mercenary squad RPG that a vocal share of the original's veteran fanbase says simplified too much of what made Jagged Alliance 2 legendary.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Keep on Mining!

A NZ$7.39 mining incremental that sold 100,000 copies in seventeen days, is finished by three quarters of the people who buy it, and spends its second half padding a two-hour game past the refund window. Its own reviewers name the trick.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Kinny and the Cosmic Cauldron

A physics-based cooking roguelike where ingredients tumble and collide inside a cosmic cauldron instead of cards sitting in a hand — genuinely inventive, well liked across hundreds of early reviews, and repeatedly accused by its own players of leaning on luck more than it should.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Left 4 Dead 2

A co-op zombie classic still Overwhelmingly Positive 17 years on, beloved for exactly what it doesn't have — no loot boxes, no unlocks, no grind — held back for the entire span of its Steam review history by one specific, remarkably persistent complaint about its Versus community.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Lethal Company

A solo developer's co-op scavenging horror-comedy that became one of the defining games of its era, still funny and still tense two years on — while its own reviews increasingly argue about whether the person who made it has moved on from it.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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LIMBO

The black-and-white puzzle-platformer that arguably started the modern atmospheric-indie wave, still Very Positive fifteen years later — and still facing the exact same trial-and-error criticism its earliest reviewers wrote, sometimes in nearly identical words.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Liquidation

A classic Warcraft III-and-StarCraft-flavoured RTS from a solo developer who spent three to five years building it with a community of beta testers before MicroProse stepped in to publish its Early Access launch — and reviewer after reviewer reaches for the exact same comparison to describe it.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Lost Vessel

A free-to-play sci-fi idle RPG built around a genuine, developer-stated no-pay-to-win promise, an active in-game chat community, and an engaged solo developer — praised by a striking number of very-high-playtime reviewers, with real friction over gear durability and one serious, unverified allegation about how the launch event tracked activity.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Machine Party

A brutal, funny Mario Party from the Buckshot Roulette developer, for ten dollars — with no matchmaking, and a developer who has now said plainly that there never will be.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Megabonk

One person made a NZ$14.75 survivors-like that sold a million copies in a fortnight and sits at 94% across 104,643 reviews — and whose most invested players have been asking for the same balance pass since October 2025.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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MIO: Memories in Orbit

A visually stunning metroidvania whose reviews split sharply on one specific mechanic — permanent health loss tied to the story — that several players call the moment the game turns from a favorite into a frustration, and others say isn't nearly as punishing as it's made out to be.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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