The Wanderer reading room

Game Reviews

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.

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OneShot

A short, genuinely inventive puzzle adventure that reaches outside the game window to talk to you — 98.3% positive, and if you're on Linux or Steam Deck you should buy a different version of it.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Outer Wilds

A time-loop mystery about a tiny solar system that "everyone says" you need to experience knowing nothing about — Overwhelmingly Positive at 95.6%, and honest enough with itself that its own top negative review is a genuinely unresolved crowdfunding controversy, not a design flaw.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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Papers, Please

A border-checkpoint bureaucracy simulator that turns document-checking into genuine drama, thirteen years on. Its creator says its themes have only become more relevant with time — a fact he finds less like vindication and more like a tragedy.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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Patrick's Parabox

A puzzle game about pushing boxes into boxes that contain themselves — 99% positive, one of the highest-rated games in this library, with a motion-sickness problem its own longest-playing critic begged the developer to fix.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Portal 2

Fifteen years on, Portal 2 remains one of the most acclaimed puzzle games ever made — and its small, honest minority of dissent is worth hearing, from real motion-sickness reports to a considered argument that the sequel traded the original's focus for scale.

9.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Rabbit and Steel

MMO raid mechanics compressed into a 40-minute co-op roguelike, 97.9% positive with a perfect recent record — and a colour-clarity problem that kills players through no fault of their own.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Red Dead Redemption 2

An emotionally overwhelming, near-universally acclaimed western epic — undermined for over six straight years by a mandatory launcher that reviewers say can prevent you from playing even the offline single-player campaign, and a 2024 "Labor of Love" award many felt the game's own neglect made absurd.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Resident Evil 4

A masterfully modernized remake of one of gaming's most influential horror games — briefly and seriously undermined in early 2026 by a new anti-piracy DRM that tanked performance on an already three-year-old game, until Capcom reversed it within a month.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Resident Evil Village

A gorgeous, genre-blending horror-action sequel to Resident Evil 7 — beloved broadly, but facing a real, consistent identity debate from series fans who miss the tighter, scarier tone that came before it, plus a launch-week DRM performance problem that's echoed the franchise's reputation years later.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Schedule I

A co-op drug-empire sim that turned into one of the biggest word-of-mouth hits of the past two years, built almost single-handedly and beloved for exactly the reasons Breaking Bad was — right up until the empire is built and there's nothing left to do with it.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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SIGNALIS

A retro survival horror game that wears its Resident Evil and Silent Hill influences openly and still manages real originality — beloved for its atmosphere, queer storytelling and puzzle design, with one honest recurring complaint about how tedious that puzzle design gets.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Slice & Dice

A minimalist dice-based roguelike tactics game, originally built on itch.io, that's earned near-unanimous acclaim on Steam — with an unusually small negative-review pool centred on pacing and content depth rather than any fundamental design flaw.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

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SOMA

A philosophical sci-fi horror game about consciousness, identity and what survives an underwater apocalypse — nine years on, still Overwhelmingly Positive, and still honestly criticized by a consistent minority for gameplay that some feel gets in the story's way.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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SpaceChem

The game that started a genre, fifteen years old, and the lowest-rated of the seven engineering puzzlers in this library — which turns out to say more about being first than about being worst.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Stray

Four years on, 97.2% positive across 176,389 reviews — and its critics are still arguing that the only reason it scores that well is that you play as a cat.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

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