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.
SFB Games rebuilds PS1-era survival horror with real craft and a genuinely unsettling abandoned theme park, and both critics and its own huge Steam audience agree it's one of the best tributes the genre has had in years — though a real, specific minority argues the tribute keeps the atmosphere and drops the actual survival tension that made the originals tense.
8 / 10
A genre-defining rhythm-roguelike hybrid, Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 23,000 reviews, whose own Steam achievement data confirms exactly the kind of brutal difficulty wall a decade of players have described — only 7.8 percent of tracked players ever finish Zone 4.
8 / 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 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
A turn-based tactical folktale from The Lion's Song studio Mipumi, praised almost unanimously for its storybook atmosphere and deterministic, puzzle-like combat — a short, polished, low-replay-value gem that reviewers consistently describe as knowing exactly when to end.
8 / 10
A fifteen-year-old medieval sandbox that still sits at Overwhelmingly Positive across over 135,000 reviews, built on a mounted-combat system nothing else has fully replicated and a modding scene that arguably did more for the game's longevity than its own campaign design.
8 / 10
ATLUS rebuilds its genre-defining 2006 JRPG from the ground up with modern combat, full voice acting and a gorgeous new engine — a near-unanimous critical success undercut by a well-documented, still-discussed bait-and-switch over what the premium edition's DLC actually included.
8.5 / 10
A Pomodoro focus timer fused with a tiny idle farm, overwhelmingly loved by a review corpus full of people describing real help with procrastination, ADHD and depression — held back from a perfect score by a specific season-transition bug that can quietly lock progress, and a content ceiling dedicated users eventually hit.
8 / 10
A faithful, modernised remake of the 1993 Super Famicom cult classic that still asks players to inherit an empire across generations and accept that mindless grinding makes enemies stronger, not weaker — a design philosophy Steam's own userbase is visibly still arguing about, thirty years on, even as the remake itself lands close to universal critical acclaim.
8 / 10
Bloober Team's full remake of the 2001 psychological horror classic is a genuine reputational turnaround for a studio previously known for mixed-to-poor reviews, praised by critics and players alike for its atmosphere and expanded combat — undercut for a large, persistent share of its own audience by PC stuttering that patches still hadn't fully resolved nearly two years after launch, and by a real, still-argued debate over whether clarifying the original's ambiguities helped or hurt the story.
8 / 10
A classic-styled turn-based RPG about anxiety, found family and a healer joining her girlfriend's adventuring party, whose deliberately blunt title undersells writing reviewers describe as some of the most emotionally honest in the genre — held back only by real RPG Maker engine limitations around fullscreen and key rebinding.
8 / 10
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 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 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 narrative-driven tactical RPG about an insurance adjuster who has to deny a claim and save the world, mixing Fire Emblem-style grid combat with a fully voiced dating-sim layer and a time-management system some players find liberating and others find punishing.
8 / 10
A genetics-driven frog-breeding sim from one half of the APICO team, built around discovering and cross-breeding dozens of frog species across a waking and a dreaming world -- beautifully drawn and warmly received, with real friction in its navigation, inventory and pacing that a year and a half of updates hasn't fully resolved.
8 / 10
One of the finest metroidvanias in years, nearly universally loved on its own merits and just as consistently marked down by its own players for a mandatory Ubisoft Connect launcher — a friction so persistent it's still generating complaints in 2026, on a game whose acclaimed development team Ubisoft disbanded within weeks of release after a sequel was refused.
8 / 10
A falling-sand physics factory game — every grain, drop and spark is a simulated resource — that went into Early Access on 13 August 2026 to a near-unanimous reception, backed by Hooded Horse and pre-release press comparing it to Factorio, Terraria and Noita all at once.
8 / 10
