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-developer idle/incremental game about growing a server farm from a battered laptop to planet-scale compute — three genuinely distinct minigames, a finite Singularity ending that Steam's own achievement data shows a striking share of players actually reach, and no microtransactions or ads anywhere on a NZ$4.79 price tag.
8 / 10
Asymmetric's prohibition-era, Lovecraft-flavoured follow-up to the award-winning West of Loathing -- Overwhelmingly Positive on its own considerable merits, with a review sample so consistently framed against its beloved predecessor that "not quite West of Loathing" is practically this game's second title.
8 / 10
A VR-only mech-punching roguelite that reviewers routinely call one of the best physics games the headset has, praised for locomotion so smooth it solves VR's usual nausea problem — reviewed here as a genuinely mature release, since Steam's own patch history shows it's still being actively expanded two and a half years after launch, multiplayer included.
8 / 10
A surreal, Love-de-Lic-inspired adventure about a cursed intelligence bound to a corpse, helping a desert island's misfits across a game explicitly built around 24 replays -- one of the most positively received games this lane has covered (98.75%), with the tiny negative sample converging on a specific, real complaint about late-game grind and unclear puzzle guidance.
8 / 10
A roguelite beat 'em up from the Streets of Rage 4 team that critics and players both rate as one of 2025's genre highlights -- hand-drawn combat and worldbuilding that land almost universally, undercut by real multiplayer stability issues and a vocal minority who find its Hades-shaped meta-progression more familiar than fresh.
8 / 10
A single Japanese developer's 15-year solo project -- a sprawling 2D action RPG that earned an Overwhelmingly Positive badge on scale and ambition alone, with a review corpus that argues hard over its writing, its grind, and whether its combat gets too busy to read.
8 / 10
A cozy, sincerely heart-warming miniature adventure where every problem is solved by peeling and placing the right sticker — beloved almost universally, with its one real thorn being an achievement list that forces a second playthrough to fully complete.
8 / 10
A top-down adventure about a self-doubting painter restoring colour to a world that's lost it, from the Wandersong and Celeste team -- Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam and still drawing new five-star reviews five years on, with one consistent, specific complaint about how the painting itself controls.
8.5 / 10
A two-person studio's isometric action-adventure about a soul-collecting crow, nominated for two BAFTAs and named Golden Joystick's Best Indie Game of 2021 -- Very Positive on Steam five years on, with one specific design choice, a total absence of any map, dividing even its fans.
8 / 10
Capcom's confident return to its own franchise after 2013's divisive DmC reboot, splitting combat across three wildly different playable characters -- Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam seven years on at 96% of over 169,000 reviews, with a scattered but real minority complaint about DLC nickel-and-diming, a stale PC port (still no ultrawide or DLSS support), and a story some players find thinner than the combat around it.
8.5 / 10
A Zelda-shaped action-RPG about dungeon crawling as an extreme sport, set in a magical-realist Austrian ski resort where the real hook is who you meet between dungeons, not what you fight inside them.
8 / 10
A turn-based tactical RPG where you crew a living tank with a village of orphaned animal children, and where losing a boss fight can mean feeding one of them into a cannon — a war-is-hell premise this review's negative sample barely challenges, since only 5 of the game's 384 reviews are negative at all.
8 / 10
A turn-based pixel-art RPG about a party trapped in a time loop, from solo-ish developer insertdisc5 -- Overwhelmingly Positive at 97% and beloved for its writing and characters, but a small, consistent and often self-aware minority of players say the game's central design idea, deliberately repetitive loops, genuinely fails to work as a game even when it succeeds as art.
8.5 / 10
A solo developer's six-year passion project about a one-hit-kill assassin who can foresee his own fights -- Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam seven years on, still one of the best-reviewed action games of its era, but famous now for a very specific ongoing story: a free story-continuing DLC promised since shortly after launch that, as of this review, still hasn't shipped.
8.5 / 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 standalone sequel to one of the sharpest deduction games in years, trading its predecessor's ancient-world mystery for a 1970s conspiracy -- slightly less airtight than the original by its own fans' admission, but still one of the best pure puzzle-narrative games released in 2024.
8.5 / 10
An audacious collection of 50 complete, fictional 8-bit-era games from the creator of Spelunky, near-universally admired for its craft, with a real and well-articulated minority finding its retro difficulty and near-total lack of guidance a genuine barrier rather than charm.
8.5 / 10
A wordless puzzle game that tells a person's life story entirely through the boxes they unpack across eight house moves -- BAFTA Game of the Year winner and Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam, with a value complaint so uniform across five years of reviews that even most of its fans raise it unprompted.
8 / 10
A four-person Melbourne studio's stealth-comedy about being a horrible goose became a genuine 2019 cultural phenomenon and a Game of the Year award-sweeper -- seven years on it's still Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam, with the same specific, consistent friction reviewers named at launch: deliberately awkward controls and a very short runtime for the asking price.
8.5 / 10
A long-running brawler franchise's biggest gamble in years — swapping real-time combat for a turn-based JRPG system — paid off with the series' best critical reception yet, though a vocal minority of longtime fans still argue the new combat never matched the writing around it.
8 / 10
Villa Gorilla's pinball-metroidvania hybrid won a BAFTA for Best Debut and sits at Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam eight years on -- a genuinely inventive idea that a small but consistent minority of players say the traversal design never quite lives up to, in a game its one-off studio never got the chance, or perhaps never wanted, to follow up.
8 / 10
A solo-developed open-world action-adventure RPG stuffed with hand-written dialogue and reality-bending secrets, drawing genuinely rare "hidden gem" praise from reviewers who describe it as what Undertale could have been if Undertale had been more fun to actually play, held back only by simple combat and a navigation system some players find genuinely disorienting.
8 / 10
A Mesoamerican fantasy RPG that fuses turn-based planning with real-time execution across three interlocking revenge stories, built around a guilt mechanic that manifests literally as ghosts hounding you in battle — critically adored by almost everyone who played it, and a commercial underdog its own fans openly wish had found a bigger audience.
8 / 10
An Overwhelmingly Positive Indonesian-set coming-of-age adventure whose pixel art and emotionally resonant story draw near-universal praise, dragged down by a specific, widely repeated complaint that fetch quests and backtracking bloat what could be a much tighter experience.
8 / 10
