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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Celeste

A precision platformer about climbing a mountain while depressed, built on one of the genre's most respected Assist Mode implementations — and still, honestly, brutally hard for a meaningful slice of the players who bounce off it.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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Cuphead

A hand-drawn, 1930s-cartoon-style boss-rush platformer that's as punishingly hard as it is beautiful — and whose second most-upvoted negative review points at a real, still-unaddressed colourblind accessibility gap that echoes a pattern this library keeps finding.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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Fallout: New Vegas

Widely regarded as the best-written game in the Fallout series, and just as widely known for crashing constantly — a reputation so baked into its identity that even its own fans write songs about the bugs in five-star reviews, fifteen years on.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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God of War

A near-universally acclaimed reinvention of the series into a slower, more personal Norse epic — praised almost unanimously, with an honest, considered minority of longtime original-series fans who miss the classic combat, and a real, recurring Steam Deck "Verified" labeling problem tied to a documented memory leak.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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INSIDE

A haunting, wordless puzzle-platformer from the makers of Limbo, whose ending has divided players in exactly the same way for nearly a decade — not through controversy, but through a deliberate ambiguity some find profound and others find frustrating.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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OMORI

A turn-based RPG that splits its time between a colourful dream world and a grounded, emotionally heavy reality, built around themes of grief and mental health with a level of care that's earned it one of the most devoted followings of any recent indie RPG.

9 / 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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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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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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ULTRAKILL

97.4% positive across 239,293 reviews, still in Early Access after nearly six years — and it set its all-time player record in February 2026, more than five years after launch.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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Undertale

A decade-old solo-developed RPG that redefined what a choice-driven combat system could mean, sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive across a third of a million reviews. The recurring negative review isn't a criticism of the game so much as a criticism of how impossible it is to live up to its own reputation.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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Cyberpunk 2077

The most famous broken launch in modern gaming is now, five years and one total rebuild later, one of the best open-world RPGs you can buy. Ninety-six of its hundred most recent reviews are positive. The thing to check before buying isn't the game any more — it's the licence.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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Disco Elysium

A detective RPG with no combat, twenty-four skills that argue with you inside your own head, and writing that has no real rival in the medium. Its negative reviews are almost entirely from people who call it a masterpiece and ask you not to buy it.

9.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Hi-Fi RUSH

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

Reviewed

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Split Fiction

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

Reviewed

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Inscryption

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

Reviewed

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Noita

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

Reviewed

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Persona 5 Royal

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

Reviewed

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