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 pixel-art farming and life-sim RPG that spent two years in Early Access proving it isn't just another Stardew Valley clone — jumping, real combat, D&D nights at the tavern, and writing sharp enough to win over players who'd sworn off the genre — reviewed on the eve of its 1.0 launch with 97.7% of nearly 30,000 reviews already behind it.
8 / 10
A faithful, expanded rebuild of one of open-world RPG history's most influential games — the 2001 original that reviewers credit as a direct forerunner to The Witcher — that returned to the Colony to Very Positive reception and 500,000 copies sold, undercut at launch by genuine, severe bugs and softlocks that the developer has since addressed through a rapid, transparent patch cadence.
8 / 10
An Earthbound-flavoured turn-based RPG about a socially anxious old man, his truffle-pig best friend, and a corporate conspiracy involving giant mushrooms — built around a genuinely novel idea where awkward conversations function as real combat encounters, and near-unanimously loved by the players who've played it.
8.5 / 10
Tango Gameworks' rhythm-action surprise remains Overwhelmingly Positive across nearly 36,000 Steam reviews, widely regarded as one of the finest games Xbox has published in a decade — a reputation shadowed by a genuinely poignant, fully documented history this review can confirm in
9 / 10
Hazelight Studios' GAME OF THE YEAR-winning co-op adventure remains one of gaming's most celebrated couch-co-op experiences, Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 266,000 Steam reviews and independently confirmed to have sold over 23 million copies — undercut for a real, recurring minority of players by a genuinely dark, forced late-game "torture" sequence, and by online connectivity friction this review can confirm was substantially, though not entirely, fixed by a documented May 2024 update removing the mandatory EA Launcher requirement.
8 / 10
A cat-breeding turn-based tactics roguelite from Binding of Isaac creator Edmund McMillen, nearly a decade in the making — deep, absurd and genuinely inventive enough to draw comparisons to Darkest Dungeon and Sid Meier in the same breath, with real, persistent complaints about breeding tedium and interface friction that a major mid-2026 patch only partly resolved.
8 / 10
A bigger, more mechanically ambitious sequel to one of the deckbuilding roguelike genre's most respected entries, landing at 95% positive on Steam even as a genuinely coherent chorus of the original's most devoted fans argue this expansion came at the cost of what made Monster Train click in the first place.
8 / 10
A hex-grid roguelike that swaps a conventional deck for a board you draft and build tile by tile, from the maker of the well-regarded mobile hit Cards of Terra — hitting 1.0 to a small but completely unanimous chorus of praise after what several reviewers admit was months of criminally low visibility.
8 / 10
An ARPG's worth of build synergy packed into an Asteroids cabinet, at thirteen dollars and 96% positive. The one thing standing between it and everybody is the control scheme — and that's a deliberate choice the game is literally named after.
8 / 10
A hundred thousand copies in its first week, and deservedly — you play a single parasite tearing organelles out of immune cells and grafting them onto your own body. The best twin-stick roguelite of the year so far, with one genuinely misleading line on its store page.
8.5 / 10
A breakout co-op climbing hit from a small Landfall-affiliated team, selling millions of copies for NZ$11.99 and earning genuine, chaotic devotion from its players — briefly overshadowed by a real, well-documented EULA controversy the developers reversed within days, and by two specific, widely repeated complaints (no save option, a punishing difficulty spike) that a remarkably attentive year of patches has since substantively addressed.
8.5 / 10
The game that brought the isometric party RPG back from the dead, and spent a decade being judged against a memory of Baldur's Gate rather than on its own terms. Fewer than half its buyers finish Act I — but the ones who push through average eighty hours.
8 / 10
A genuinely fresh, emotionally resonant sci-fi shoot-and-hack adventure from Capcom, six years after its original 2020 announcement, praised near-universally for its unusual father-daughter bond and inventive combat — undercut for a real, consistently repeated share of the sample by a combat loop that grows repetitive in its back half, and by genuine, well-documented Denuvo DRM access problems affecting even paying, non-piloting players.
8 / 10
Arkane Austin's 2017 immersive sim remains Very Positive across more than 54,000 Steam reviews, widely regarded as one of the genre's finest achievements — a reputation this review can confirm survived the closure of the very studio that made it, when Arkane Austin was shut down entirely by Microsoft in 2024, and a real controversy over the game's own title, which this review can confirm Bethesda forced onto an unrelated story over the objections of Arkane's own founder.
8 / 10
The game that invented the shopkeeper RPG, sixteen years old and still 96% positive. Every buy-low-sell-high game since owes it something — and most of them dropped the one idea that made it work.
8 / 10
A survival-horror triumph in its first half and a widely-debated tonal collapse in its second, wrapped around Capcom's biggest launch of the year — Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 100,000 Steam reviews and 8 million copies sold, while a large, detailed share of that same sample argues the game falls apart exactly when it should be building toward its climax.
8 / 10
The sequel that fixed nearly everything wrong with the original — and got criticised for it. Its sharpest reviewers say the classes are now too balanced and every run plays the same. Both things are true, and that's the interesting part.
8 / 10
Eight years after release and still getting a major update every month, Rust remains the most uncompromising survival game ever made — and the one whose own veterans write the funniest negative reviews about how much of their lives it took.
8 / 10
A solo-developed, critically adored twin-stick shooter from a Housemarque alumnus, widely hailed by its own fanbase as a spiritual successor to Geometry Wars — Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam with a 93 Metascore, undercut for many players by a steep, unevenly tutorialised difficulty curve that even genre veterans describe as a genuine barrier to entry.
8 / 10
A fan remake that outgrew the game it copied, and has been updated every year for a decade. It's free on Android, open source on GitHub, and carries no ads or purchases of any kind — so the interesting question isn't whether it's good. It's why you'd ever pay for it.
8.5 / 10
A visually extraordinary, deeply personal Southern Gothic folktale from Compulsion Games, praised almost universally for its art, music and story, undercut by a real, consistently repeated complaint that its combat grows tedious well before the credits roll — released into a genuinely poignant real-world backdrop in which Xbox reportedly began shutting down the studio that made it only months after publicly celebrating its Peabody Award win.
8 / 10
A cozy management game about dying, and one of the few games that earns the crying its reviews describe. The management half is fetch quests and minigames — which is the honest thing to tell you, because the store page sells it the other way round.
8 / 10
Hazelight Studios' co-op action-adventure follow-up to 2021's Game of the Year winner It Takes Two, drawing Overwhelmingly Positive reviews and near-universal praise for its inventive, constantly-shifting gameplay and unusually generous Friend's Pass model — with a smaller, coherent minority of the same fanbase arguing its writing and characters fall short of its predecessor.
9 / 10
A grid-tactics deckbuilder that fuses Into the Breach-style positioning with a real card engine and a Space Invaders-flavoured alien assault, backed by a Metacritic 85 and an Overwhelmingly Positive Steam score — with real, specific complaints about UI clarity and balance outliers sitting underneath the acclaim.
8 / 10
