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.
Freehold Games' science-fantasy roguelike spent nine years in Steam Early Access before reaching 1.0 in December 2024, and what it built in that time is less a dungeon crawler than a character-building engine wrapped around a simulation that keeps generating outcomes nobody scripted. The reputation for impenetrability is earned. So is the one for depth.
8.8 / 10
A 16-bit-style JRPG built almost entirely by one developer over seven years, whose real achievement isn't the pixel art but a heat-gauge combat system that replaces MP attrition with active turn-by-turn risk management.
8 / 10
A spearfishing roguelite and a sushi restaurant manager share one save file, and the join is the best thing about it — what you catch by day is what you sell by night. The game just won't stop adding new systems on top of that, long after the core two have proven they didn't need the help.
8 / 10
A single-shard spaceship MMO where losses are permanent, the economy is entirely player-built, and your character keeps training on a real-world clock whether you're logged in or not. Twenty-three years old, recently rebranded by its own studio, and still the sharpest argument in the genre for why risk has to be real to mean anything.
8 / 10
Erik Asmussen rebuilds his own factory-town formula from the ground up around a controllable avatar, a hungry volcano deity and a full ocean of islands — a sequel that risks alienating veterans of the original in its opening hours before proving, mechanic by mechanic, that almost every change was worth making.
8 / 10
The free open world is good enough to carry a full-price game on its own — climbing, gliding and elemental combat form one of the best traversal systems in the genre. What you pay for is everything above the story campaign, and the review is really about where that line sits.
8 / 10
Fifteen years past release, the hardest part of reviewing Minecraft isn't judging whether it's good — it's telling a new buyer which of its two incompatible engines to actually install, and being honest about what stopped changing while the block count kept climbing.
9 / 10
A turn-based extraction roguelike where every mercenary is a disposable clone, every mission can end in a single unlucky turn, and the cosmic horror waiting beneath the corporate PMC contracts is exactly as unforgiving as the combat.
8 / 10
An idle farming sim that gave up on being a game you look at, and became the desktop companion the whole genre now copies — charming and honest about its own smallness, if a little thin once the farm is built out.
8.5 / 10
A top-down action-roguelite from the studio behind Dungreed, built around a Tetris-style artifact inventory that turns loadout planning into its own puzzle game — dense, generous with content, and let down late by a damage-sponge final boss and a steep endgame DPS wall.
8 / 10
An automation game that skips the usual pretend-programming abstractions and just hands you a Python-shaped scripting language, then asks you to actually write the loops and functions that run your farm. The rare "learn to code" game that works as a game first.
8.5 / 10
A build-crafting incremental about small creatures smashing a rock for wealth, where the usual "number always goes up" comfort is replaced by permanent choices that can genuinely sabotage a run.
8 / 10
A solo developer's follow-up to Magic Archery swaps archery for architecture, building an incremental around growing a single wizard's tower toward a definite, well-earned ending rather than an infinite number-go-up treadmill.
8 / 10
A tactical fantasy RPG where you never actually give a combat order — you write a standing set of instructions for each unit and then watch your army carry them out, which makes it one of the closest things a big-budget console release has come to an automation game.
8 / 10
A survival-crafting game with action-RPG combat and a boss list instead of a tech tree, built around a PvP fantasy that most of its players quietly opt out of. Two years past 1.0, with the studio now calling it content-complete, it's worth being precise about which version of this game you're actually signing up for.
8 / 10
A god-game sandbox where civilizations of humans, orcs, elves and dwarves grow, fight and collapse almost entirely on their own while you throw lightning, plagues and dragons at them. Nearly five years into Steam Early Access, it's still one of the most purely enjoyable toyboxes in PC gaming — as long as you never expected it to have an ending.
8 / 10
Flyway Games turns a thirty-second countdown into a health bar, a currency and a weapon at once — a review of how far the time-freeze mechanic carries a roguelite built entirely around never letting the clock feel like punishment, and where cluttered onboarding and a softening difficulty curve hold it back.
8 / 10
Timberline Studio's cozy chef sim ties its farming-and-cooking loop directly into a trick-taking deckbuilder — a review of whether feeding your adventurers is a real tactical decision or just a chore standing between you and the next card fight.
8 / 10
A dice-based deckbuilding roguelike that swaps Slay the Spire's card hand for a diamond grid of rollable dice, and mostly proves the swap was worth making — though a shorter campaign and some uneven early rewards keep it from the genre's very top tier.
8 / 10
A voxel colony sim that lets you build up and down instead of just sideways — vaulted keeps, buried cellars, and structural stability all become real design problems. Going Medieval left Early Access after nearly five years with a genuine endgame bolted on, and mostly earns it.
8 / 10
A solo developer's first-person melee roguelike spent two and a half years in Early Access before its 1.0 finally gave the combat a story worth finishing and a boss worth building toward.
8 / 10
A top-down sandbox RPG that spent six years in Early Access building the one system that actually separates it from the Terraria-likes around it — recruit settlers, hand them jobs, and your colony keeps working while you're off fighting something in a cave.
8 / 10
A three-to-four-hour premium incremental about harvesting nodes and defending against waves of invaders, built with a hard ending instead of an infinite number-go-up treadmill — and popular enough to spawn an entire micro-genre of imitators.
8 / 10
A non-idle incremental where every resource tick comes from casting spell combos yourself rather than watching a timer, built around a genuinely novel glyph-alchemy system for crafting your own spells from scratch.
8 / 10
