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 gorgeously animated, surreal Northern English comedy from a two-person Barnsley studio that won a BAFTA for British Game and drew a Metacritic score in the high 80s — loved by the large majority of its own huge Steam audience too, though a real, coherent minority argue its deliberately minimal "walk and slap" gameplay and distinctly regional humour don't stretch to fill even its brisk three-hour runtime.
8 / 10
A genuinely ambitious open-world vampire action RPG from Rebel Wolves, a new studio founded by Witcher 3 veterans, that fills a real gap for vampire-themed RPGs and draws strong, consistent praise for its story and atmosphere, undercut by widespread but hardware-inconsistent performance problems, real controller bugs, and a deeply divisive time-pressure mechanic that a large share of reviewers say was misrepresented before launch.
7 / 10
A genuinely alien, atmospheric open-world RPG that Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 22,000 reviews largely on the strength of its world design — and one whose own most devoted fans openly debate whether its RNG-based combat and journal-only quest tracking have aged into charm or into a real barrier depending on who's asking.
7.5 / 10
A lovingly crafted homage to Monkey Island-era LucasArts adventures, following a young druid on a mission to save her grove — genuinely clever puzzle design and an award-nominated soundtrack, undercut by rough English localisation and the genre's classic sin of obscure, under-hinted puzzles.
7.5 / 10
A storybook hero discovers he can leap out of his own 2D picture-book pages into a 3D world around them, in one of 2024's most visually inventive and BAFTA-nominated indies — beloved for a concept and presentation critics and players agree is genuinely special, and just as consistently described by a real slice of its adult audience as a game built for children first, with gameplay depth and stability to match.
7.5 / 10
Evil Empire, the studio that carried Dead Cells through years of live-service updates, applies the same acrobatic movement and 2D action-roguelite formula to the Prince of Persia name — genuinely fluid to move through, but persistently criticised across its 15-month Early Access run and beyond for weapon and run variety that never quite escapes its own most obvious comparison.
7 / 10
A free, gorgeously animated stealth-comedy about a werewolf working the night shift as an office janitor, fighting his own instincts while cleaning up messes both mundane and monstrous, whose charm and generosity earn near-universal praise undercut by one widely reported, specific difficulty spike right at the finish line.
7 / 10
A tropical management sim from prolific developer Kairosoft that reviewers say goes unusually deep on its signature building-combo mechanic, landing Positive despite real, specific complaints about clunky desktop controls, an oversized fixed UI, and a completionist achievement so difficult one reviewer needed six full playthroughs to earn it.
7 / 10
A four-dollar joke game about playing a tumbleweed that turns out to have a genuine incremental progression system underneath — undercut by an "idler" that literally can't idle, since it pauses the moment the window loses focus.
7 / 10
A psychedelic metroidvania trapped in a time loop aboard a cosmic, living space station, praised almost unanimously for its eye-melting art direction and score — and criticised, with real specificity by critics and players alike, for a repetition-heavy loop structure, inconsistent combat, and at least one well-documented save-corrupting bug still being reported more than a year after launch.
7 / 10
A tabletop-rooted, text-heavy caravan RPG set in a genuinely bleak post-apocalyptic fantasy world — its 85% Very Positive rating comes from readers who fell for the lore and the atmosphere, while a large and detailed minority describe the exact same systems as an RNG-driven economy that turns the game into what more than one reviewer calls a toxic relationship.
7 / 10
A tiny, cheap dual-wand voxel FPS roguelike sitting somewhere between Ultrakill and Heretic — every single one of its lifetime reviews recommends it, though even its biggest fans admit there isn't a huge amount of game underneath the charm.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely novel twin-stick roguelike that turns your actual desktop window into the shrinking arena you're fighting for, universally praised for a hook nobody else has attempted this well, undercut by real performance crashes and a shallow enemy roster once the initial novelty settles in.
7 / 10
An atmospheric, beautifully art-directed Early Access horror action RPG from the creator of cult favourite Withering Rooms, drawing strong early praise for its Victorian horror mood and music, but facing a detailed, credible critique from longtime fans that it has traded the original's punishing survival-horror identity for a more generic soulslike formula, alongside a reproducible severe performance issue at maximum settings on high-end hardware.
7 / 10
A solo developer's cheap, charming bullet-hell roguelite about a shrimp who is inexplicably also a wizard — a near-unanimous crowd-pleaser backed by an unusually sustained fourteen-plus-month patch cycle that kept adding real content even after the developer announced a new game.
8 / 10
A stylised 2D Metroidvania whose turn-based combat plays like real-time action — attack combos on your turn, parry and block on the enemy's — wrapped in abstract, philosophical art direction, undercut by navigation that loses players and a difficulty curve with no way to ease it beyond what patches have already softened.
8 / 10
A cheap, addictive bullet-hell roguelite whose enemies genuinely follow the rules of Conway's Game of Life and other cellular automata — a rare, intellectually distinctive hook backed by persistent weapon enchanting, let down only by camera jitter some players find physically uncomfortable and a few specific upgrade-timing frustrations.
8 / 10
A frenetic, jazz-scored smash-'em-up about a captive gorilla tearing through procedurally shuffled levels — Overwhelmingly Positive at 95%, with a small but pointed negative corpus arguing the same randomisation that makes each run fresh also makes it impossible to practice or master a level, on a game most reviewers, positive and negative alike, finish in under two hours.
8 / 10
A solo-developed, old-school text RPG with a genuinely rare feature — a fully screen-reader-accessible interface built for blind players from the ground up — that quietly launched on iOS in March 2024 before reaching Steam in September 2025 with a perfect, if tiny, 11-for-11 positive review record.
8 / 10
A gorgeous, minimalist real-time tactics roguelite where you evacuate a doomed Viking-era island kingdom one procedurally shaped island at a time — Very Positive at 93.2% across 6,561 reviews for seven years running, with a remarkably consistent complaint from its own fans that the whole experience is over, and starts repeating itself, well before it should be.
7 / 10
Square Enix's remaster of a genre-defining 1995 tactical RPG splits its own most invested fans down the middle — the presentation, voice work and orchestration draw near-unanimous praise, while the specific gameplay changes to levelling, permadeath and the class system have produced some of the most detailed, dug-in disagreement this library has read on any remaster.
7.5 / 10
A surreal breakup-simulator that mashes turn-based RPG combat, skateboarding and competitive cooking into one story about confronting your exes and your family — Very Positive at 97.2% across 248 reviews, with a tiny but sharply consistent negative sample naming the same two soft spots, clunky skating and combat that turns repetitive, against writing and art almost nobody disputes.
8 / 10
A mouse-only physics rage-climber that wears its debt to Getting Over It on its sleeve — genuinely popular, genuinely generous with a free second chapter, and honest about two real problems its own players keep raising: hand strain from the controls, and a 2025 achievement rework that asked its most dedicated fans to grind fifty clears instead of one.
7 / 10
A NZ$7.39 visual novel dressed up as a clicker game from npckc, in which a hero who fails to rescue the princess spends two-odd hours making amends by growing magic berries — Very Positive at 95% of 79 reviews for its storybook art, warm cast and unusually deep accessibility options, with the one consistent complaint being that the "clicker" half thins out into repetitive quota-grinding by the later routes.
7.5 / 10
