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.
Grinding Gear Games rebuilt combat around commitment and rhythm instead of clear speed, redrew the passive tree and skill-gem system from the ground up, and is still rebuilding the endgame around them nineteen months into Early Access — a genre-defining campaign wrapped around systems that are still visibly under construction.
8 / 10
A colony sim that treats the AI storyteller, not the tech tree, as the main system — every skill point your colonists earn is really just raising the stakes for the disaster it's about to send you. Seven years and five expansions after 1.0, the total price of owning everything has become one of the review's own subjects.
9 / 10
A third-person roguelite where every pickup multiplies the last one while a fixed difficulty clock keeps climbing underneath you — number-go-up design wearing a shooter's clothes. Reviewed against the game's full history, including the DLC launch Gearbox itself admitted put the PC version "in a really bad place," and the year it took to fix.
8 / 10
An automation game solved in three dimensions instead of two, where every belt run is something you physically walked and every ratio problem is also an architecture problem. Five years after leaving Epic exclusivity, its 1.0 release confirms it was worth the wait.
9 / 10
A decade in Early Access ends with Drilling Thunder, a genuinely substantial 1.0 update that finally gives Scrap Mechanic's celebrated building physics a full story campaign — while leaving the host-dependent multiplayer that has bugged players since 2016 exactly as it was.
8 / 10
Sabotage Studio's turn-based RPG borrows Chrono Trigger's parts openly and reassembles them well — timed hits, a lock-breaking combat layer and a day/night mechanic that actually changes puzzles — but the writing never catches up to the systems around it.
8.5 / 10
FromSoftware throws out the build variety and co-op that define its other games and replaces them with a single unbreakable rule — get better at deflecting, or don't get past this boss — and turns that gamble into one of the sharpest action games ever made.
9 / 10
A pure factory-automation puzzle stripped of combat, scarcity and even failure, where the only opponent is a shape's own geometry. The tightest version of this genre's core loop yet built, and a useful test of what's left once every source of friction is removed.
8 / 10
A gas station job simulator where the real task is deciding, customer by customer, who's human — and living with what happens when you get it wrong in either direction.
8.5 / 10
The game that invented the deckbuilding roguelike as a genre in its own right, still sitting at 97% positive on Steam seven years on, and still worth the asking price even with a sequel already in Early Access.
9 / 10
A small Paris studio built a turn-based CRPG on Dungeons & Dragons' free 5.1 rules document rather than a paid brand license, and the result plays closer to an actual tabletop session than any of its bigger-budget rivals — verticality, light and darkness included — while looking and sounding like exactly the smaller production it is.
8 / 10
A potato-powered clicker that spends its idle timers on story instead of retention, and then does the one thing almost nothing in the genre does — it actually finishes.
8 / 10
A decade on, the thing that still makes Stardew Valley work isn't the farm, it's the clock — energy, daylight and a hard seasonal deadline turned into the best progression pressure the genre has ever built, even if the pressure quietly switches off once you're rich.
9 / 10
A 2011 sandbox that turned "dig, build, fight" into a full RPG and never stopped growing — fifteen years and counting of free updates, still one of the best-value games on Steam.
9.5 / 10
Fifteen years on, Skyrim's open world is still the reason people play it — walk in any direction and something is there. The systems underneath that world, from swordplay to loot to the dialogue tree, have aged a lot less gracefully, and Bethesda has spent a decade finding new ways to resell the same game. Reviewed as Skyrim Special Edition, the version Steam actually sells you today.
8 / 10
The first 3D Zelda didn't just adapt a 2D formula to a new dimension — it solved the problems that new dimension created, and the industry has been using its answers ever since. A retrospective on the N64 original, with a clear steer on which version to actually play today.
9.5 / 10
Eleven years and one free next-gen overhaul later, CD Projekt Red's open-world epic is still best understood through its side quests rather than its main story — and its combat, inventory and level-gating have aged in ways the writing never did.
9 / 10
A free browser incremental that spends its first ten minutes as a joke and its last hour as a genuinely tense endgame, built around a premise everyone already half-knows and a structure that keeps rewriting the rules underneath it.
8.5 / 10
A Viking survival sandbox that gates its whole progression behind biomes, each one resetting your sense of safety from zero. Five and a half years into Early Access, with a firm 1.0 date finally on the calendar, it's worth asking how much of that reputation still holds.
8.5 / 10
Poncle stripped aiming and attacking out of the action-roguelite formula and the result became one of the decade's most copied designs — a review of what actually holds four years later, now that the screen-filling spectacle has become the whole pitch.
9 / 10
A free-to-play space-ninja shooter that has been adding systems since 2013 without ever taking one away. Genuinely one of the most generous live-service games on the market, and one of the hardest to explain to a friend. Reviewed with Jade Shadows: Constellations current.
8 / 10
Shiro Games' open-world mercenary RPG treats a company of sellswords as a small business — wages, food, gear repair and prisoners are the real spreadsheet, and combat is what happens when that spreadsheet goes wrong.
8 / 10
