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 gorgeous Castlevania-meets-Dark-Souls action RPG whose strong opening hours give way, by a large share of its own reviewers' account, to boss reuse and repetitive combat -- and whose launch was briefly derailed by a real, since-resolved controversy over an overreaching EULA.
6.5 / 10
A satisfying, tightly made active-incremental about a giant hand smashing geometric shapes, whose most inventive idea — changing the game's mechanics with every prestige — is also its most divisive, with a real share of players describing later prestiges as actively worse than what came before rather than a genre-typical power climb.
6 / 10
A rhythm-FPS built on an extraordinary heavy metal soundtrack, near-unanimously loved for exactly that -- and now carrying a real, documented postscript after publisher Funcom shut down developer The Outsiders in October 2025, leaving the game's future uncertain.
7.5 / 10
A run-and-gun arcade legend reborn as a slow, careful roguelite tactics game -- genuinely loved for its art, music and fan service, genuinely argued over for trading Metal Slug's trademark panic for turn-based patience.
6.5 / 10
The third game in Slothwerks' beloved Meteorfall deckbuilder series swaps a solo hero for a three-character party, delighting a small but devoted review base -- while its promised next content update hasn't surfaced on Steam in the thirteen months since the developer's own last patch note.
6.5 / 10
A free-to-play mobile idle dungeon crawler ported to Steam with a price tag but without a rebalance, leaving the energy gates and premium-currency walls in place while removing the only way to actually get past them.
3.5 / 10
A cheap, cheerfully chaotic idle mining game whose launch reviews all landed before a major "Big Bang" update rewrote its ending, fixed its most-cited bugs and added the prestige payoff early buyers said was missing — leaving a genuinely funny, well-supported small idler whose new true ending has its own, very real pacing problem.
6.5 / 10
A tiny, charming desktop-companion fishing idler that sits in the corner of the screen while its owner does something else, unanimously well liked by the small handful of players who have reviewed it, with a few honest small-scale wishes and a year of update silence worth noting.
6.5 / 10
A genuinely deep idle RPG that hooks its most dedicated fans for hundreds of hours on a thoughtful 72-hour offline time bank, undercut by an overwhelming pile of half-explained systems and a corroborated, apparently still-unpatched bug that stops the final boss cold.
6 / 10
The Bearded Ladies' XCOM-inspired tactics game, from former Hitman and Payday designers, is Very Positive on Steam eight years on -- but its marketing promise of open tactical freedom runs into a review history that's remarkably consistent about a harder truth: there's really only one viable way to play it, and the game punishes almost every other approach severely.
7 / 10
A solo Swedish developer's five-years-in-the-making remake of his own 2014 cult Flash game -- bullet-time gun-fu narrated by a sentient banana -- still Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam seven years on, with a strikingly consistent complaint: a first half nearly everyone loves, and a back half a real share of players say runs out of ideas.
7.5 / 10
A cheap, small-scale Korean co-op roguelite about scavenging zombie-overrun regions by day and defending a hideout by night -- Mostly Positive from a modest audience, genuinely fun with friends according to most who tried it, but held back by real, repeated multiplayer bugs and no public matchmaking to find them with.
6 / 10
A Warhammer 40,000 gang-warfare tactics game with real strategic ideas, undone at launch by crashes, save corruption and broken AI so severe that its own most-upvoted review opens with a warning not to buy it — patched hard for nine months, then abandoned entirely in mid-2021.
5 / 10
A fantasy necromancer-builder where you assemble undead minions from mismatched body parts and send them to defend your tower -- a genuinely inventive Very Positive hit at NZ$4.49, undercut by minion AI reviewers call frustratingly dumb and a publisher that moved on to a sequel while this one's bugs stayed open.
6 / 10
A cheap, XCOM-flavoured tactics RPG that casts the player as the undead menace rather than the defenders for once, rough at launch but backed by a solo developer who has kept patching, balancing and expanding it for two and a half years running.
7 / 10
A crossover that put two very different action-anime franchises on the same box art and then, by its own review corpus's overwhelming consensus, built the combat, tone and mechanics around only one of them -- leaving fans of the other feeling like they bought the wrong game.
6 / 10
A gorgeous Gaslamp Fantasy survival-crafting game with a passionately invested fanbase, currently caught between real studio turmoil — confirmed layoffs and a Tencent acquisition — and a content-direction reversal that alienated some of its most dedicated long-time players.
5.5 / 10
Level-5's sequel swaps Studio Ghibli's direct involvement for a hybrid of open-world action RPG and kingdom-building sim -- gorgeous and generous with content, but eight years on its combat, story and half-baked army battles are the recurring complaints even among fans who put hundreds of hours into it.
7.5 / 10
An auto-attacking bullet-heaven roguelite that launched the same month Vampire Survivors hit 1.0 -- a genuinely well-built entry in a genre that exploded around it, still Very Positive years later, but reviewers increasingly frame it against sharper rivals that didn't exist when it came out.
6.5 / 10
A medieval colony sim that pitches itself as Crusader Kings' court intrigue crossed with RimWorld's colonist simulation -- a genuinely funny, genuinely ambitious generator of noble-house disasters, still rough enough after two years in Early Access that plenty of its own fans are telling each other to wait.
6.5 / 10
A gorgeous, genuinely relaxing incremental about scooping ocean plastic into a recycling boat, whose short-session reviewers love the art and music and whose longer-session reviewers hit a wall of confusing systems, a since-fixed missing autosave, and balance that still reads as broken weeks after launch.
5.5 / 10
MDickie's 3D remake of his own School Days recycles the Wrestling Empire combat engine into a chaotic school-life sandbox -- genuinely funny for the built-in fanbase, but saddled with camera and control complaints that have gone unfixed since launch, and a recent trust problem over undisclosed AI-generated content.
6 / 10
A gorgeous, warmly-written 2.5D skateboarding platformer that earned its Very Positive score on the strength of the game itself -- and has spent the years since fighting a genuinely documented publisher controversy that has nothing to do with skating.
7 / 10
A charming, Evil Genius-styled boot camp management sim whose base-building and art direction win consistent praise, dogged from launch through three years of updates by the same complaint — reviewers keep calling it a "waiting simulator" with too little strategy underneath.
6 / 10
