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.
Fallen Tear: The Ascension is a Kickstarter-backed, hand-drawn Metroidvania where the allies you recruit reshape your combat and exploration abilities, and this review's sample finds genuinely stunning presentation and combat feel undercut by serious crash and softlock bugs — problems severe enough that the developer has just delayed the game's move to full release specifically to address them.
6.5 / 10
An Early Access idle RPG with a genuinely deep feature list — ascendancy resets, crafting, expeditions, a city to build — undercut by a documented damage-scaling bug, a data-loss report, and reviewer accounts of a development pace that visibly stalled a few months after a promising launch.
5 / 10
A post-apocalyptic follow-up to Far Cry 5 with a colorful new coat of paint, undercut by a widely-repeated complaint that its map, weapons and structure are recycled from its predecessor and repriced as a full standalone game, plus a tiered enemy/weapon level system many reviewers say feels imported from a mobile microtransaction game.
5.5 / 10
A tiny, relaxing asteroid-mining incremental from solo-ish studio LostVolBytes, with a likeable stranded-in-space framing device and a short, digestible runtime, undercut by reported stutter/lag issues and a grind that outstays its welcome for some players just as others wish it ran longer.
6.5 / 10
A NZ$28.99 co-op farming sim that has held Very Positive across roughly 17,600 Steam reviews for eight years — built almost exactly like a free-to-play mobile farm game, timed crop growth and all, but without a single mandatory purchase, which is exactly why it keeps earning multi-thousand-hour devotion from some players and "this is Farmville" refunds from others within the same review page.
7 / 10
A charming, food-themed roguelite city-builder clearly indebted to Against the Storm, held back by a blueprint RNG system reviewers in two languages agree can make runs unwinnable through bad luck alone, and a baffling lack of key rebinding.
6.5 / 10
A three-person team's follow-up to The Deadseat turns cult-horror hunting into a tense card-and-map puzzle, though Act 1 is only a third of the promised story.
7.5 / 10
A cozy-looking but genuinely demanding incremental strategy game from solo developer Quiétude, casting players as an ant colony gathering food and evolving specialized workers to satisfy an ever-hungrier Queen, Mostly Positive across 237 English reviews for its charming art and surprisingly deep build-optimization puzzle — with a widely repeated complaint that progress walls force exact "correct" builds and long, wasted waiting periods to discover mistakes.
6.5 / 10
A free-to-play, Early Access idle MMORPG set against the Investiture of the Gods mythology, earning a small but Positive early reception for its nostalgic Legend of Mir-style grind and mythological setting, tempered by a language-barrier complaint and its own honest status as an unfinished Early Access release.
6 / 10
A first-person survival shooter that mashes Far Cry, Turok, and Jurassic Park into one island of mercenaries and dinosaurs, praised for its ambitious scope and atmosphere but hobbled at launch by rough AI, technical bugs, and optimisation problems.
5.5 / 10
A single-player, side-scrolling homage to classic Legend of Mir-style grinding that clearly lands with its target nostalgia audience, undercut by punishing drop rates and a developer whose community conduct reviewers repeatedly call into question.
5 / 10
A budget-priced turn-based tactical RPG about a squad of adventurers defending a darkness-besieged world, where reviewers consistently praise the pixel art but split sharply over whether the tactics underneath have real depth or wear thin fast.
5.8 / 10
A physics-driven incremental collectathon where players grow a black hole by devouring themed dioramas — bowling alleys, underwater casinos, hibachi restaurants — praised unanimously by an early review sample for its quick, satisfying arcade loop and built-in level editor.
7.5 / 10
A solo developer's absurdist run-and-gun platformer about an armed fish, launched into Early Access with fast, ULTRAKILL-flavoured combat and a meme-fuelled sense of humour that carries most of its weight.
6.5 / 10
A visual-novel life-sim about grief, told through a young woman's first month living alone, whose story lands with genuine emotional force even as its repeating daily-chore minigame loop wears out its welcome for a meaningful share of reviewers.
6.7 / 10
An underwater, Brotato-style wave-survival roguelite where you play a hungry small animal hunting fish for calories, praised by an early, entirely Chinese-language review base for genuinely hand-drawn art and an active, listening developer, while multiple detailed reviews flag performance stutters, unclear character-unlock conditions and unfinished UI as the rough edges of a game still visibly mid-polish.
6.5 / 10
A live-action FMV detective thriller and romance sim set aboard a luxury cruise ship, sequel to Detective Please Keep My Secret, whose large Overwhelmingly Positive review sample praises its cinematic production values and returning cast while sharing a wide range of specific, repeated complaints about clue-flooded deduction puzzles, static dialogue-heavy pacing, a rough English translation, and real bugs.
3 / 10
Inklingwood Studios, a husband-and-wife team who turned a pandemic-era career pause into a Kickstarter-funded classic point-and-click adventure, delivers a lovingly crafted 1930s Louisiana ghost mystery that earns some of the year's warmest reviews in the genre, tempered by a specific, consistent minority who found its dialogue overlong and its humour too gentle for the Broken Sword and Monkey Island comparisons it invites.
7.5 / 10
A solo developer's spiritual successor to Biomass swaps that game's crumbling factory for a sinking, faction-riddled city, wrapping a tight beam-weapon combat system around a branching, choice-reactive world with seven-plus endings.
7.6 / 10
Kyoto-based Skeleton Crew Studio, the team behind 2021's Olija, follows up with a martial arts roguelite built around rehearsing every fight infinitely in your head before executing it for real, a mechanic reviewers consistently praise as a genuinely fresh solution to action-game difficulty even as a specific minority finds its slow death-to-retry loop and lack of run-to-run reward undercut the roguelite structure wrapped around it.
7.5 / 10
A beautiful return to the world of Forgotton Anne "Forgotlings" positions itself as a prequel and spiritual successor to Throughline Games' 2018 cult favorite "F
6.6 / 10
A solo-developed turn-based tactics roguelite that sends a party of heroes to slay gods, earning strong day-one praise for its build variety and simultaneous-turn co-op, tempered by reviewer complaints about punishing boss escalation and repeat-kill enemy design.
7.5 / 10
An Unreal Engine 5 FPV drone-racing simulator in Early Access from FPVLabs, Mixed across 99 reviews — enthusiast pilots consistently praise the most realistic flight physics they've felt in any sim, but steep hardware demands, a two-map content limit, and real controller-recognition problems are holding back a wider recommendation.
6 / 10
A cozy creature-collector about caring for a magical island of frogs while piecing together a forgotten past, built on a Neko Atsume-meets-Virtual-Villagers charm and unusually thoughtful accessibility options, undercut for a vocal minority by clunky minigame controls and occasionally vague quest direction.
7.5 / 10
