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.
The trilogy-closing entry that fuses the worlds of the first two Xenoblade games into one shared battlefield, built around Chain Attacks and a class system deep enough to hold up across an eighty-hour campaign — with a story some major outlets still found predictable.
8.5 / 10
A shipwreck-survival action RPG that turns rescuing NPCs into a settlement-building system and backs it with some of the fastest, most readable real-time combat Nihon Falcom has ever shipped. The PC version carries genuine baggage from a rough 2018 launch and a since-rewritten English script, but the game underneath both has aged well.
7.5 / 10
A voxel zombie survival game built entirely around a scheduled siege that arrives on a known clock and gets worse every time. Eleven years in Early Access ended in July 2024 — the core loop is still one of the smartest in the genre, but the years show in how it looks, runs and argues with its own community about what it used to be.
7.5 / 10
A colony sim that turns its whole progression system into a programming lesson — you don't unlock better robots, you unlock better scripts, and the game lives or dies on whether that scripting language can keep up with the colony you build with it.
7.5 / 10
Backpack Hero turns the inventory screen itself into the entire combat system — item shape, orientation and neighbouring slots decide what a fight looks like, not a separate stats page. A look at whether that idea, and the game built around it, survived the jump from a free browser prototype to a finished commercial release the developer has since gone quiet on.
7.5 / 10
An action-combat MMO where the fighting is closer to a character-action game than a tab-target RPG, the real long-term game is an offline worker economy running nodes and trade routes while you're logged out, and gear upgrades can fail hard enough to destroy the item you spent months building. Ten years old, still getting weekly content, and still the most mechanically dense MMO most players will ever half-understand.
7.5 / 10
A two-person Swedish studio's pixel-art ARPG stacks skill trees, runes, sockets and artifacts into a genuinely deep build sandbox for the price of a takeaway meal — but the achievement data shows most players never see the endgame that's supposed to justify it.
7 / 10
An action RPG about playing an MMO, built around one verb — throwing an energy ball that ricochets off walls — that does double duty as the combat system and the language every dungeon puzzle is written in.
8.5 / 10
A first-person fantasy dungeon crawler where every raid ends one of two ways — you walk out through a portal with everything you found, or you die and hand it all to whoever killed you. Two years into Early Access on Steam, the extraction loop is still the sharpest thing about it, and the studio's legal history is still not fully behind it.
7 / 10
A factory-and-colony sim where the automation isn't belts or menus of orders but a real node-based programming language you wire up yourself, one behavior graph per unit. The most technically ambitious game in its genre, and honest proof of how much that ambition costs at the door.
7 / 10
A free browser incremental about a single dragon that eventually consumes the entire numeral system, built solo (with two collaborators) by Demonin and finished — deliberately — in 2024, with no further updates planned.
7.5 / 10
The Definitive Edition of Dragon Quest XI doesn't reinvent the turn-based JRPG, and that's the point — an orchestral score, a full second 2D presentation of the same 100-hour campaign, and combat that trusts the format instead of subverting it.
8.5 / 10
Read review of Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age — Definitive Edition
A menu-only farming MMO that has quietly run since 2021 with no ads and a genuinely optional shop, propped up by a community wiki so thorough that half the game's actual strategy lives outside the app.
7 / 10
Square Enix rebuilt Final Fantasy as a single-character action game with a Devil May Cry pedigree and the most ambitious set pieces the genre has ever staged, then paid for it with the party control, gear depth and build variety that used to define the series.
7.5 / 10
Cygames' stand-alone action RPG wraps a four-player hunting-game loop inside a JRPG's full production budget, and the combat mostly earns the spectacle around it. This is not the mobile gacha that shares its name — it's a single upfront purchase with no pulls and no premium currency — but its sigil-driven, Proud Quest endgame asks more patience than it repays.
7.5 / 10
Obsidian shrinks you to the size of an ant and lets that single premise reshape exploration, combat and crafting all at once. Nearly four years after 1.0, the backyard is still one of the smartest survival maps in the genre — even as Obsidian's attention has visibly moved on to the sequel.
8 / 10
Twenty-two years before "life-skill game" became a genre, Mabinogi built one — a rank-based skill system and an ageing/rebirth loop that still let a character who never fights become a genuinely finished build, currently mid-transplant into a new Unreal Engine 5 body.
7.5 / 10
Moonlighter splits itself between a dungeon-crawling roguelite and a shop-management sim, and the two halves are tied together by a genuinely clever idea — you set your own prices and read the customers to find out if you got it right. The question worth answering eight years on is whether that idea, and the combat around it, still hold up once the spreadsheet gets written.
7.5 / 10
Team Ninja builds a three-stance, Ki Pulse-driven combat system deeper than almost anything else in the genre, then buries a big chunk of its own goodwill under Diablo-scale loot noise and mission design that leans hard on reused level layouts.
8 / 10
Nolla Games' falling-sand roguelite simulates every pixel of fire, gas, liquid and rock as one honest physical system, then hands you a wand editor deep enough to break that system on purpose. Four and a half years after its 1.0 release, only one in ten owners has ever finished it.
9 / 10
The sequel that actually lets its eight travelers meet each other, wrapped around the same Break and Boost combat that made the original worth playing and a day/night toggle that changes what every town has to offer.
8.5 / 10
The version of Persona 5 that's actually for sale everywhere now, and the one worth reviewing on its own mechanical terms — a turn-based JRPG whose real engine isn't the combat or the style, it's a calendar that turns every evening into a resource-allocation decision with consequences that outlast the day.
9 / 10
The 2020 game that started the shape-cutting automation genre, built by stripping Factorio down to logistics alone — no combat, no scarcity, no enemies. Cheap, historically important, and rougher than the sequel it spawned.
7.5 / 10
A city builder that abandons the colonist as its unit of decision and manages a population instead — tens of thousands of citizens, an empire beyond the walls, and an interface that makes you earn every bit of that scale.
7.5 / 10
