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 brand-new semi-idle browser-style MMORPG that wears its RuneScape and Melvor Idle influences openly — guilds, a tabbed skill list, a world map gated by level bands — two days into Early Access and already patching multiple times a day.
7 / 10
A faithful, ambitious remake of the 1993 BBS door game Usurper — text-only dungeon crawling in a persistent world of autonomous NPCs who marry, betray and die whether you're logged in or not — built by a solo developer whose speed wins loud praise, while the game's single most-upvoted review raises real, detailed concerns about development stability.
7 / 10
A grand-strategy game brave enough to be about economics instead of conquest, four years and seventeen DLC later still arguing with its own players about warfare — and its newest expansion needed nine hotfixes in two months.
6.5 / 10
A free, open-source desktop pet with 51,500 reviews at 98.3% — 84% of them Chinese — and a cloud of malware accusations that turn out to trace back to one mundane, long-fixed bug.
7.5 / 10
KIXEYE's post-apocalyptic base-building MMO strategy game, running continuously since its 2011 Facebook debut, finally arrives on Steam — met largely by returning veteran players whose reviews describe over a decade of accumulated pay-to-win pressure and unaddressed cheating that the platform switch hasn't changed.
4 / 10
A Facebook-era MMO strategy game from 2011 finally arrived on Steam this July, and its first reviewers are overwhelmingly its own long-lost veterans — many disappointed by what fifteen years and a free-to-play economy have done to the game they remember.
4.5 / 10
A genuinely brutal, spectacular power-fantasy action game that nails the Warhammer 40K Space Marine fantasy — layered with real complaints about DLC pricing, always-online requirements, and a background installer that alarmed players even after the likelier explanation turned out to be more mundane than "malware."
7.5 / 10
A solo-developed RTS that lets you drop out of the top-down view and fight alongside your army as a third-person hero unit — a genuinely distinctive hook undercut by a campaign that arrived late in development and a handful of real, independently reported bugs.
6 / 10
A free PSX-style survival horror game set in a deep-sea prison where cutting off a monster's limb makes it multiply — reviewed on its complete 16-review sample, which splits cleanly between reviewers charmed by its atmosphere and reviewers who call it an unfinished alpha.
6 / 10
A gorgeous, enormous free wuxia open world with some of the most charming systems design in any live-service RPG — welded to an energy meter, five battle passes and a cosmetic gacha that its own store page describes as cosmetics-only.
7.5 / 10
A cheap, dark-comedy skeleton-army incremental with real charm in its premise and a six-review sample split almost exactly down the middle — including two reviews that make directly opposite, specific technical claims about the same systems.
5 / 10
A procedural storytelling tactical RPG that follows the same handful of heroes from their first pitchfork fight to old age, generating genuinely moving personal arcs — until enough playthroughs reveal the same event templates repeating underneath the charm.
8 / 10
A gorgeously presented card-battler roguelike whose steep, deliberately punishing difficulty split its launch reception sharply — genre veterans defending it as fairly hard rather than broken, newer players describing runs so polarized that skill barely seems to matter.
7.5 / 10
One of the best-feeling shooters on the market, wired into a progression system that several of its own designers appear to have disagreed about — and, after two years in Early Access, finally close to 1.0.
7.5 / 10
A free, solo-developed idle RPG on its 161st update after seven years — with a monetisation model its biggest spenders defend, and a review calling it abandoned that the patch notes flatly disprove.
7.5 / 10
An alien-planet survival and building sandbox — described by one of its own players as "stitched from Don't Starve, Terraria, Stardew Valley and RimWorld" — that launched into Early Access with a punishing hunger system and has spent thirteen straight days of near-daily patches turning early frustration into a genuinely glowing recent reception.
7.5 / 10
A free-to-play idle strategy MMO about building an egg-themed civilization, split almost exactly down the middle between players who find real layered depth in its economy and combat systems, and players frustrated by a slow start, progress-halting bugs, and lingering distrust of the developer's previous game.
5.5 / 10
A veteran-defined tank warfare MMO whose Steam launch stumbled over locked-out existing accounts in 2021, and whose long, escalating pay-to-win reputation reached a documented breaking point in May 2025 when Wargaming introduced tiered loot boxes that sent its most invested ten-year players heading for the exit.
5 / 10
A handsome late-Ming soulslike carrying a Mixed badge that English-speaking players didn't give it — and a post-launch patch that changed the story out from under the people who'd finished it.
7.5 / 10
The most completely simulated economy in games, eight years of free updates, and one recurring problem — in a game about giving orders to AI, the AI is what 61 of its hundred negative reviews complain about.
7.5 / 10
A dad taught himself to code so his 8-year-old son could have a game where he "finds cool swords and fights monsters forever" — a genuinely sweet origin story wrapped around a standard-issue idle RPG that its own early players are split on once the swords run out.
6.5 / 10
Hazelight Studios' prison-break co-op predecessor to It Takes Two and Split Fiction remains Very Positive across more than 102,000 Steam reviews for its inventive, purely two-player design — but this review can confirm a real, still-current complaint It Takes Two eventually resolved: A Way Out's mandatory EA App launcher continues to cause connection failures, crashes and Steam-invite friction in reviews dated as recently as August 2025, with no fix announcement found anywhere in the developer's own Steam communications.
6.5 / 10
A co-op survival crafting game that traps scientists inside a Half-Life-flavoured secret research facility after a containment breach, Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 41,000 Steam reviews for its inventive setting and crafting depth — with a remarkably consistent, still-current complaint that its final act and late-game content don't live up to everything that came before.
8 / 10
A solo developer in Edinburgh shipped a complete, story-driven survival-crafting game straight to 1.0 with no Early Access period — a genuine feat that's earned near-universal respect, complicated only by a real and recurring complaint that the store page sells it as something more open-ended than the tightly linear campaign it actually is.
7.5 / 10
