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 free, deliberately one-hour incremental game about training a commoner into a master archer, honest about its own scope and warmly received for it, though its own audience is split on whether an incremental game should ever have a definite ending.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeously drawn desktop-companion bathhouse sim starring a Korean webtoon dog character, backed by the most sustained developer support this lane has found all session, split between a large international fanbase that adores it exactly as it is and a real minority who find the content thinner than the price and the "Idler" tag suggest.
7 / 10
A rhythm-FPS built on an extraordinary heavy metal soundtrack, near-unanimously loved for exactly that -- and now carrying a real, documented postscript after publisher Funcom shut down developer The Outsiders in October 2025, leaving the game's future uncertain.
7.5 / 10
The Bearded Ladies' XCOM-inspired tactics game, from former Hitman and Payday designers, is Very Positive on Steam eight years on -- but its marketing promise of open tactical freedom runs into a review history that's remarkably consistent about a harder truth: there's really only one viable way to play it, and the game punishes almost every other approach severely.
7 / 10
A solo Swedish developer's five-years-in-the-making remake of his own 2014 cult Flash game -- bullet-time gun-fu narrated by a sentient banana -- still Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam seven years on, with a strikingly consistent complaint: a first half nearly everyone loves, and a back half a real share of players say runs out of ideas.
7.5 / 10
A cheap, XCOM-flavoured tactics RPG that casts the player as the undead menace rather than the defenders for once, rough at launch but backed by a solo developer who has kept patching, balancing and expanding it for two and a half years running.
7 / 10
Level-5's sequel swaps Studio Ghibli's direct involvement for a hybrid of open-world action RPG and kingdom-building sim -- gorgeous and generous with content, but eight years on its combat, story and half-baked army battles are the recurring complaints even among fans who put hundreds of hours into it.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeous, warmly-written 2.5D skateboarding platformer that earned its Very Positive score on the strength of the game itself -- and has spent the years since fighting a genuinely documented publisher controversy that has nothing to do with skating.
7 / 10
A Lovecraftian idle RPG that spent months as a well-loved free demo before its 12 August 2026 launch -- an auto-battling, town-building, gear-crafting incremental that early buyers call one of the deepest idle games in years, with a real complaint underneath the praise about a stat and customisation system that gets overwhelming fast.
7.5 / 10
A relaxed, satisfying business sim about building a computer hardware empire from a one-room office to a global brand, hooking even its harshest critics for tens of hours before a genuinely broken product-scoring mechanic and a year-plus of development silence catch up with it.
7 / 10
Obsidian's hand-illustrated murder-mystery RPG set in 1500s Bavaria earns comparisons to Disco Elysium and praise from actual medievalists -- and a genuinely substantial minority of its own fans arguing the choices that define it matter far less than the game pretends.
7.5 / 10
A one-person-built, Overcooked-inspired restaurant roguelite that sold over 1.5 million copies on the strength of its co-op chaos and permanent between-run progression -- Very Positive at Steam scale, with a consistent, well-documented complaint that its randomised upgrade rolls and multiplayer netcode haven't kept pace with everything else it does well.
7.5 / 10
A witch-run potion shop, a card-based haggling minigame that critics singled out as genuinely clever, and a debt-clock structure so demanding that fewer than one in five players who own it have ever actually paid it off -- an IGF audience-award winner whose charm and its exhausting pace turn out to be the same design decision.
7.5 / 10
Supergiant Games followed Bastion and Transistor with a fantasy exile story told through a three-on-three magical sport, and split its own fanbase in half doing it -- one of its own most quoted reviews calls it "Supergiant's worst game, but their best piece of art."
7.5 / 10
A gorgeous voxel-art fairytale action RPG, the finale of Cococucumber's Voxel Trilogy, originally launched day-one on Xbox Game Pass in 2023 and now available on Steam as an enhanced "Legendary Edition" with reworked combat and bosses.
7 / 10
Series creator Ron Gilbert's genuine return to the franchise thirty years on -- warmly received by a wide margin, and reopening the exact argument his own Monkey Island 2 ending started in 1991, with the same specific complaint dominating this game's negative reviews.
7.5 / 10
Brace Yourself Games turns Crypt of the NecroDancer's rhythm-roguelike DNA into a dedicated rhythm game where monsters are the notes -- a genuinely inventive idea that a clear majority love, held back for a real minority by readability problems at high difficulty and a DLC catalogue that now costs several times the base game.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeous Scandinavian-folklore adventure about grief and redemption from a debut studio of PlayStation veterans — critically Strong and Very Positive on Steam, with a very consistent minority complaint that its puzzle pacing, backtracking and slow, unskippable animations undercut the story it's telling.
7 / 10
A stylish "brain punk" action RPG from Bandai Namco with two playable protagonists and genuinely striking presentation -- Very Positive on Steam, though a large share of even its own positive reviews describe a game that runs out of ideas well before the credits, and a cloud-save bug that reviewers say has gone unfixed for years.
7 / 10
A real-time idle town-builder that deliberately explains almost nothing, and genuinely keeps growing while the game is closed — the rare idle game its own biggest fans call "the anti-idle game," at the cost of a sizeable share of players who never work out what to do.
7 / 10
The closing chapter of the rebooted Survivor trilogy swapped Crystal Dynamics for Eidos-Montreal and gunfights for stealth and puzzles -- a deliberate pivot that split reviewers in 2018 and, eight years and a Definitive Edition later, is still what most players argue about, alongside a specific progress-blocking puzzle bug that outlived several rounds of patches.
7 / 10
Thylacine Studios' third monster-collecting dungeon crawler is Very Positive on Steam and genuinely enormous in scope -- 1,172 Steam achievements' worth of breeding, itemisation and grind -- but its own review history is candid about a crude sense of humour some found genuinely uncomfortable, and most of its longtime fans now point newcomers to its own 2021 successor instead.
7 / 10
A lovingly built retro CRPG that fuses Ultima-era pixel art with genuine Lovecraftian horror and tabletop-inspired tactical combat, beloved for a first half that critics call nearly flawless, held to a lower score mostly by a well-documented back-half quality drop and controller support that stayed broken after a real fix attempt.
8 / 10
A well-loved return to WWII stealth-sniping that launched into the single most-upvoted negative review this library has recorded -- over a forced PvP mechanic penalizing single-player progress -- and has spent the years since accumulating a second, ongoing complaint about DLC pricing that now spans 16 separate add-ons.
7 / 10
