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.
Twelve years into Early Access, the isometric zombie survival sandbox just shipped its biggest update ever and got multiplayer back. The skill grind is still the best in the genre; the menus are still the reason half the people who buy it never see it.
8.3 / 10
An incremental mining game that turns "swing the pickaxe" into a real progression system — eight hand-designed layers, a 150-node permanent skill tree, and a four-hour runtime that ends before the loop wears out its welcome.
8 / 10
Cup Dog Games' debut strips the Soulslike down to nothing but boss fights, built around a Focus-and-Mark system that turns every encounter into a duel over who blinks first — and then asks its best players to do the whole thing again without getting hit once.
8 / 10
A tile-by-tile spaceship colony sim where you build the hull, route the gas pipes, and keep a crew of civilians fed, breathing, and sane while you search a procedural galaxy for a new home. Reached 1.0 in May 2026 after six years in Early Access.
8 / 10
Poncle and Nosebleed Interactive take the cast of a bullet-heaven phenomenon and lock them into turn-based card combat instead. The pivot works far better than it has any right to, right up until the deck-breaking builds that make the genre fun also make the back half of a run trivial.
8 / 10
Read review of Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors
A minimalist text-based incremental that spends its first act pretending to be nothing at all, then quietly reveals it was building a survival story out of firewood, huts and silence the whole time.
8 / 10
The free browser incremental that codified the modern reset ladder — dimensions into Infinity into Eternity into Reality — and is still the game every other prestige-layer idler is quietly measured against.
9 / 10
LocalThunk's solo-developed poker roguelike turns chips times multiplier into the whole game — a review of how far that one exponential idea carries a run, and where the luck, the repetition and the small-screen text start to push back.
9 / 10
Three years and eight patches after launch, Larian's D&D epic is still the reference point for what "your choices matter" is supposed to mean — and its two real weaknesses, a lopsided third act and a ruleset that rewards system mastery over roleplay, haven't gone anywhere either.
9.5 / 10
A hacking-themed incremental where the automation you'd normally unlock with currency is automation you write yourself, in real JavaScript against a real API — free, open source, and still getting rewritten out from under its own players five years after launch.
8.5 / 10
Game Science builds an entire action RPG around the Destined One's staff and the Great Sage's shapeshifting, and lands one of the best boss rosters in the genre — inside a chapter structure that looks far more open than it actually plays.
8.5 / 10
Blobfish's one-person arena shooter hands a potato six weapon slots and lets stat stacking do the rest — a review of how far chips-in-the-shop decision-making carries a twenty-wave run, and where the plain presentation and a few solved builds hold it back.
8 / 10
A free time-travel Sokoban puzzler that gets one specific, difficult idea exactly right — solving a puzzle by recording your own past actions and then working alongside the ghost of what you just did.
8.5 / 10
A turn-based RPG that makes you dodge and parry every enemy attack in real time, wrapped around a hand-painted Belle Époque France that's dying on a one-year clock — and one of the rare acclaimed games that earns the noise made about it.
9.5 / 10
The game that accidentally invented the incremental genre in an evening, still actively updated thirteen years later — and still the yardstick every idle game gets measured against, for better and for worse.
8 / 10
A mining sandbox that turns "just one more tile" into a genuinely well-paced RPG — skills level as you use them, bosses gate the map instead of a level counter, and up to eight players can dig through it together.
8.5 / 10
A roguelite dungeon crawler and a cult-management sim share one save file, and the question that actually matters almost four years on is whether they're still lending each other strength or just taking turns.
8 / 10
Red Hook Studios' gothic party roguelike turns stress into a second health bar and turns your roster, not any one hero, into the thing you're actually raising from level one.
8.5 / 10
FromSoftware's fastest, most aggressive Souls game turns everything the trilogy built up to that point — punishing combat, colossal bosses, environmental storytelling — up to a final, deliberate intensity, and closes the series out as close to a masterpiece as it gets.
9.5 / 10
Motion Twin's roguelite metroidvania turned a simple pitch — permadeath runs through a procedurally reassembled castle — into one of the best-supported action games on Steam, and it mostly still holds up now that the studio behind its five years of updates has closed the book.
8.5 / 10
Funday Games bolts a real mining loop onto the Vampire Survivors formula, so every dive asks a second question underneath "which upgrade do I pick": is that vein of nitra worth the ten seconds it takes to dig out while the swarm closes in?
8 / 10
Nine years on, the game that taught Larian how to build Baldur's Gate 3 is still the sharper tactical puzzle of the two — a combat system built from fire, water and armour that rewards a party that thinks in physics, and a brutal opening act that punishes one that doesn't.
8.5 / 10
Klei's co-op survival sandbox turns Wilson's original nightmare into a shared one, where the real threat isn't the Deerclops so much as what happens when nobody on the team remembers it's coming. A decade of free content updates against 49 mostly-cosmetic DLC entries makes it a genuinely useful case study in how to monetise a survival game politely.
8.5 / 10
A decade-old mobile idle game about running a chicken farm into the stratosphere, held together by a prestige loop, an artifact-crafting layer, and — unusually for the genre — timed co-op contracts that only work if other people show up.
8 / 10
