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 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
The roguelike that taught the genre what item synergy could be, at 97% across 439,000 reviews. Twelve years and hundreds of items later, its most experienced players are asking whether it now has too many.
8.5 / 10
Respawn Entertainment's 2016 shooter remains Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 284,000 Steam reviews, widely regarded as one of the finest FPS campaigns ever made — a reputation shadowed by a genuine, years-long multiplayer DDoS crisis this review can confirm directly from the developer's own communications, and by the mandatory EA App launcher requirement that recurs as a real, persistent complaint even in reviews from Steam Deck-era players decades removed from launch.
8 / 10
The deckbuilder that removed the luck. You see every reward in advance and rebuild your deck between every fight — which makes it the most controllable game in its genre, and is exactly why some players bounce off it. Six dollars, 251 achievements, and criminally under-noticed.
8 / 10
A puzzle game built around one genuinely brilliant idea — photographs you place in the world become the world, letting you reshape reality by swapping what a picture shows for what's actually there — undercut by a runtime and a script that its own fans agree don't live up to the mechanic carrying them.
8 / 10
Ten years on it's still the sharpest turn-based tactics game ever made, built on one brilliant, divisive decision: you are always out of time. The thing that's actually got worse since 2016 isn't the game — it's what you have to agree to in order to launch it.
8.5 / 10
The 2018 society-survival strategy game that made keeping a city's generator running feel like a moral crisis. Eight years and 136,000-plus Steam reviews later, Frostpunk still holds a Very Positive rating — earned by a first playthrough nothing else quite replicates, and complicated by a second and third playthrough that keep finding the same optimal path.
8.5 / 10
A card-based deckbuilder that spends its first act convincing you it's a horror-tinged roguelike, then spends the next two acts proving that was never the whole game — a genre-shifting puzzle box from Daniel Mullins Games that has held a 96.8% Overwhelmingly Positive rating across 134,000-plus Steam reviews for nearly five years, even as a consistent minority feels misled by its own store page.
9 / 10
A gorgeous, thematically serious entry in Bandai Namco's long-running JRPG series, built around six-character elemental combat and a slavery-and-liberation story that earns its weight. The game underneath is excellent. The launch-day decision to sell costume DLC that unlocks combat Artes and stat bonuses, advertised at every campfire, is still the thing its own playerbase brings up five years later.
8 / 10
A 2012 answer to Diablo III's always-online auction house, built by former Blizzard North designers — and still worth playing today largely because of the mod scene that kept extending it after Runic Games itself closed down.
8 / 10
A tactics RPG built on genuine terrain manipulation and a persuasion-driven branching story, from the producer behind Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler — and a game whose own Steam reviews argue at length about just how much dialogue sits between its battles.
8 / 10
The trilogy-closing entry that fuses the worlds of the first two Xenoblade games into one shared battlefield, built around Chain Attacks and a class system deep enough to hold up across an eighty-hour campaign — with a story some major outlets still found predictable.
8.5 / 10
An action RPG about playing an MMO, built around one verb — throwing an energy ball that ricochets off walls — that does double duty as the combat system and the language every dungeon puzzle is written in.
8.5 / 10
The Definitive Edition of Dragon Quest XI doesn't reinvent the turn-based JRPG, and that's the point — an orchestral score, a full second 2D presentation of the same 100-hour campaign, and combat that trusts the format instead of subverting it.
8.5 / 10
Read review of Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age — Definitive Edition
Obsidian shrinks you to the size of an ant and lets that single premise reshape exploration, combat and crafting all at once. Nearly four years after 1.0, the backyard is still one of the smartest survival maps in the genre — even as Obsidian's attention has visibly moved on to the sequel.
8 / 10
Team Ninja builds a three-stance, Ki Pulse-driven combat system deeper than almost anything else in the genre, then buries a big chunk of its own goodwill under Diablo-scale loot noise and mission design that leans hard on reused level layouts.
8 / 10
Nolla Games' falling-sand roguelite simulates every pixel of fire, gas, liquid and rock as one honest physical system, then hands you a wand editor deep enough to break that system on purpose. Four and a half years after its 1.0 release, only one in ten owners has ever finished it.
9 / 10
The sequel that actually lets its eight travelers meet each other, wrapped around the same Break and Boost combat that made the original worth playing and a day/night toggle that changes what every town has to offer.
8.5 / 10
The version of Persona 5 that's actually for sale everywhere now, and the one worth reviewing on its own mechanical terms — a turn-based JRPG whose real engine isn't the combat or the style, it's a calendar that turns every evening into a resource-allocation decision with consequences that outlast the day.
9 / 10
An open-world survival game that strips out weapons almost entirely and replaces them with an oxygen gauge, a sound cue you can't place, and a lot of very dark water. Eight years after full release, it's still the best argument that dread works better than a sword.
9 / 10
A city builder where the antagonist isn't a raid or a monster roster but a drought timer, and every dam, canal and reservoir you build is really an answer to a scheduling problem. Beavers are the theme; water is the game.
8 / 10
A voxel survival sandbox that replaces Minecraft's tap-a-block-get-an-ingot logic with real material science — knapping, pit kilns, bloomeries and alloy ratios you actually have to measure — sold direct from the developer for one flat price with no storefront in between.
8.4 / 10
A city builder that refuses to let any settlement become permanent, banking what you learn into a roguelite meta-progression layer instead. It is one of the only games in its genre to treat the endgame as a design problem worth solving rather than a state to reach and stop.
8.5 / 10
A tower-defense puzzle wearing gacha-RPG clothes, where the placement grid matters more than the banner history — and where the sanity bar, not the wallet, is the thing actually managing your time.
8.5 / 10
