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 solo-developed hybrid of tower defense, base building and action RPG that a small but uniformly enthusiastic early review sample calls easy to learn and genuinely hard to master, with real class variety, a standout soundtrack, and an achievement curve showing meaningful long-term engagement from its most dedicated players.
7.5 / 10
A two-person studio's tile-placement deckbuilder that plays like a solo board game about rebuilding smog-covered cities around magical lighthouses — genuinely satisfying for a first campaign run, though most reviewers agree it runs out of variety faster than the genre's best comparisons.
7 / 10
A gorgeous, hand-painted Slay the Spire-inspired deckbuilder whose signature gimmick — a die that lets you overwrite almost any number on screen — is exactly as much fun as it sounds, and exactly as destabilizing to the genre's usual balance as its own most dedicated fans admit.
7 / 10
A cult-favourite action RPG built around genuinely unique AI companions and monster-climbing combat, still Very Positive across 37,000-plus reviews a decade after its Steam release — and one where a cluster of January 2024 reviews describes Capcom quietly adding new anti-tamper DRM to the client just ahead of the sequel's launch.
7 / 10
A charming, tactile deckbuilding roguelike that represents its entire dungeon as a physical-feeling deck of cards and coins sliding across a tabletop — unanimously well-reviewed, backed by over a year of substantial free content updates from a small solo-adjacent studio.
8 / 10
A beautifully consistent solo-developer sequel that runs its story concurrently alongside the original Dreadrock's timeline — the same generous hint system, gorgeous pixel art, and standout music as its predecessor, with a specific softlock bug the developer patched within a month of a reviewer flagging it.
8 / 10
Read review of Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 - The Dead King's Secret
FromSoftware's expansion to Elden Ring set a Metacritic record as the highest-rated DLC ever released, and its Land of Shadow, art direction and soundtrack are close to undisputed among even its harshest critics — but a genuinely serious, well-argued minority of veteran Souls players, and Steam's own more tempered review score, describe specific late-game boss design and launch-week performance problems severe enough that FromSoftware issued a dedicated balance patch in direct response within two weeks.
8.5 / 10
A charming, Monument Valley-flavoured sliding-crystal puzzle game about a wizard touring elemental worlds — genuinely well-crafted for a two-to-three-person team, with escalating magic-based mechanics that keep 100-plus levels feeling fresh, though tutorializing gaps and a few reported achievement bugs hold it back from a cleaner recommendation.
7.5 / 10
A debut game from a studio built by BioWare and Ubisoft veterans that pitches itself as "Monster Hunter meets Shadow of the Colossus" and, for most of its 1,764-review Steam audience, actually earns the comparison — while a substantial minority documents real unpolish, from a fiercely disliked inventory system to physics bugs that launch players into the air.
7.5 / 10
An officially licensed roguelite deckbuilder starring the cast of Fairy Tail, whose charming pixel art and faithful character abilities earn genuine affection from fans and genre newcomers alike, tempered by a widely repeated launch-era complaint about thin content and a shallow card pool — a complaint this review can confirm the developer has since answered with the largest content update in the game's history.
7 / 10
The 1997 CRPG that launched a franchise still Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 16,000 reviews, sold today in a version a recurring share of its own fans say is quietly censored relative to the original release, alongside modern bug reports of vanishing inventory items and corrupted late-game saves.
7 / 10
An Early Access wealth-management sim that most reviewers say genuinely delivers an addictive, educational property-investment loop with an actively responsive developer, though a detailed finance-professional review documents several advertised systems that don't yet work as described, and a separate reviewer directly disputes the developer's own denial of AI-generated content.
7 / 10
A crowdfunded Final Fantasy Tactics successor whose deep, flexible class system earns it a Very Positive rating across 3,400-plus reviews, undercut by a specific, widely repeated complaint about weak writing and a late game that slows into a genuine chore.
7 / 10
An RPG Maker shop-management RPG about defeating capitalism by mastering it, praised as one of the best games the engine has ever produced — undercut by a persistent lack of basic quest and map tools that a genuine, years-long stream of patches never fully solved.
7.5 / 10
A tiny, free, wildly charming solo-developer riff on Stardew Valley's fishing minigame that turns out to hide a genuinely well-liked dark-comedy twist in its final level — as short as its plain title suggests, but reviewers overwhelmingly say it earns every minute.
7 / 10
A Slavic-fantasy roguelite hack-and-slash whose rune-combination combat and permadeath structure draw real Children of Morta comparisons, backed by one of the most sustained, still-active small-studio support records this lane has documented — undercut at points by specific, occasionally run-ending bugs and meta-progression reviewers call too slow to feel rewarding.
7 / 10
A medieval-themed tile-placement puzzle game where seven different structures score gold by seven entirely different rules that interact and sometimes conflict, drawing genuine comparisons to Carcassonne and Dorfromantik — a short, cheap, cleverly designed package with a few rough edges in its controls and its more random Adventure mode.
7.5 / 10
A They Are Billions-inspired horde-defense colony builder that a striking number of reviewers call a genuine improvement on that formula, backed by one of the most sustained Early Access support records in this lane, held back mainly by a rough pixel-art style and real UI friction that several players say gets in the way of an otherwise excellent design.
7 / 10
A two-person team's Diablo II-and-Titan-Quest-inspired ARPG set in Southeast Asian folklore, built around a Path of Exile-style skill-linking grid reviewers call some of the most genuinely inventive build-crafting in the genre — running on movement and inventory systems a similarly large share call clunky enough to fight the fun.
7.5 / 10
A dazzlingly designed point-and-click adventure about squabbling gods and a rift threatening to consume the world, whose overflowing charm, character design, and writing earn near-universal affection, tempered by a specific, recurring complaint that its central dialogue-stealing mechanic is fiddlier and shallower than the game surrounding it deserves.
7 / 10
A solo-developed boomer shooter with gunplay reviewers call some of the best the retro FPS revival has produced, wrapped around a campaign so short — two to five hours depending on difficulty — that near every review agrees it isn't worth its full asking price.
7 / 10
A heartfelt, RPG Maker-built throwback to SNES-era JRPGs that reviewers repeatedly call a hidden gem for its writing, characters and old-school combat — clouded by specific reviewer allegations of AI-generated art in some collectible portraits, and real balance complaints about random encounters and an underperforming lead character.
7 / 10
A tightly paced medieval card-based autobattler with a loyal demo following that mostly carried over into a well-received full release, complicated by a detailed, expert-level dispute over whether the new civilization bonuses added genuine strategic variety or broke the demo's more careful balance, plus a launch-day bug and an undisclosed telemetry detail.
7 / 10
A completely free, unofficial Hololive fan-game that stands with the best Vampire Survivors-likes on genuine build diversity and challenge alone — increasingly weighed down by grindy side content and one mandatory platforming gauntlet reviewers near-unanimously dislike.
8 / 10
