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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Survival exploration/automation horrorWindows PC

Dishwashing Simulator

A genuinely inventive genre mashup disguised behind a joke title, blending dungeon exploration, base-building automation, and creeping dread as a prisoner forced to wash dishes in a dystopian facility, whose real atmosphere and mystery are near-unanimously undercut by an almost farcically consistent complaint — a punishing, poorly-controlled parkour section at the very end that appears to frustrate nearly every reviewer regardless of how much they otherwise enjoyed the game.

5.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Action RPGWindows PC

Divine Divinity

Larian Studios' 2002 breakthrough action-RPG, the founding entry of the franchise that eventually led to Divinity Original Sin and, indirectly, Baldur's Gate 3, remains a genuinely ambitious open world — but a real, well-corroborated pattern of crashes and save-file loss on modern PCs is a serious risk worth understanding before investing dozens of hours.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Action, Adventure, Indie, RPGWindows PC

Divinum

A solo-developed action-adventure with genuinely exceptional, Sekiro-and-Hollow-Knight-adjacent combat that reviewers widely praise as its clear standout achievement, badly undercut by a four-to-seven-hour runtime that ends abruptly right after the second weapon unlocks, thin metroidvania structure despite marketing that implies otherwise, and a story that largely vanishes after the opening levels.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Psychological horror visual novelWindows PCmacOSLinux

Doki Doki Literature Club!

Doki Doki Literature Club! spends its opening hours doing everything a cute high-school dating sim is supposed to do, then spends the rest of it doing almost nothing a dating sim is supposed to do. Nearly a decade after it became one of the most talked-about indie releases of its era, its own small Steam review sample is still arguing about whether the subversion is a genuine achievement or a mean-spirited trick played on an unsuspecting audience.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Co-op horror detective/social deductionWindows PC

Doll Impostor

A prolifically updated co-op horror detective game about identifying a killer doll before dawn, whose huge, still-growing content library and genuine fan devotion are tempered by persistent multiplayer crash bugs, allegations of AI-generated art creeping into recent updates, and a specific, sourced controversy over the publisher's own branding that multiple reviewers describe as disrespectful toward Indigenous people.

6 / 10

Reviewed

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PuzzleWindows PCmacOS

Dolmenjord - Viking Islands

A charming, cheap Viking-themed tile-placement puzzler whose relaxed atmosphere is undercut by hidden rules players have to discover through trial and error, and a keyboard/mouse remapping option the developer promised was "coming very soon" back in December 2022.

5.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Deep fantasy 4X turn-based strategyWindows PCmacOSLinux

Dominions 6 - Rise of the Pantokrator

The latest entry in a legendarily deep, decades-running 4X strategy series about warring gods, praised by its own devoted fanbase as one of the richest strategy games ever made, while a large, specific contingent of longtime veterans argue this particular sequel doesn't offer enough new content to justify its price over its predecessor, and carries forward the series' long-standing, notoriously steep learning curve and clunky interface unresolved.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Voyeurism puzzle simulationWindows PCmacOSLinux

Do Not Feed the Monkeys

Do Not Feed the Monkeys hands you a chair, a bank of hacked security cameras, and one simple rule you're constantly tempted to break — never interact with the people you're watching. Its own reviewers agree the premise and its moral test are genuinely compelling; a real minority argue the resource-management busywork wrapped around that premise gets in its own way.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Survival CraftingWindows PCmacOSLinux

Don't Starve

Klei Entertainment's Gothic-whimsical wilderness survival game, Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 33,000 reviews for its distinctive art style and uncompromising crafting-survival loop — undercut by a notoriously steep, under-explained learning curve, permadeath that can erase dozens of hours to a single mistake, and a persistent complaint that content development has shifted almost entirely to its multiplayer spin-off.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Retro JRPGWindows PCmacOSLinux

Dragon Fantasy: The Volumes of Westeria

A loving, chapter-structured homage to classic Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, bundling Book I and its sequel Book II together — reviewers consistently praise the humor and nostalgic execution, while independently converging on the same specific finding that the included sequel is the weaker of the two games.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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adventure,point-and-click

Drascula: The Vampire Strikes Back

A 1996 comedy-horror point-and-click adventure from Alcachofa Soft, freely distributed by the developer and now running on a self-hosted ScummVM/WebAssembly engine - confirmed genuinely working with real mouse-driven walking across multiple distinct scenes.

7.4 / 10

Reviewed

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Comedy dating visual novelWindows PCmacOSLinux

Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator

Dream Daddy sends a single dad into the seaside town of Maple Bay to date seven other dads, mixing genuinely funny writing and charming character art with a specific, heavily discussed narrative choice that a large share of reviewers argue undercuts the game's own themes of self-acceptance.

6 / 10

Reviewed

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SimulationWindows PC

Dream House Days DX

A content-rich, genuinely addictive apartment-management sim that longtime fans call among Kairosoft's best work, undercut by the same "barely a port" problem found across the studio's Steam releases — a controller-first mobile design with almost no adaptation for mouse and keyboard.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Deckbuilding RoguelikeWindows PCmacOS

Dream Quest

A solo-developed 2014 mobile deckbuilding roguelike that reviewers independently and repeatedly credit as the genre's actual origin point — predating and directly influencing Slay the Spire, Monster Slayers and Hearthstone's Kobolds and Catacombs expansion — buried under presentation even its biggest fans call some of the ugliest they've ever seen.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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adventure,point-and-click

Dreamweb

A 1994 cyberpunk-noir adventure from Creative Reality with an unusually dark, mature tone even by adventure-game standards, freely distributed by its developer and now running on a self-hosted ScummVM/WebAssembly engine.

6.8 / 10

Reviewed

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Point-and-Click AdventureWindows PCmacOSLinux

Dude, Where Is My Beer?

A lovingly hand-drawn homage to Sierra and LucasArts point-and-click adventures about one man's search for a simple pilsner in a town of craft-beer snobs — its writing and art earn near-universal praise, while its puzzle logic revives the genre's most notorious old flaw right alongside its charm.

6 / 10

Reviewed

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StrategyWindows PCmacOSLinux

Dummynation

A streamlined, real-time geopolitical conquest game from a solo developer who's still shipping updates more than four years after launch, though a major 2024 overhaul alienated a meaningful share of the fanbase that loved the simpler game it replaced.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Indie, SimulationWindows PC

Dungeon Bodega Simulator

A retro-styled fantasy shop sim with genuinely heartfelt writing, immaculate atmosphere and widely beloved pettable slimes and a shop cat, praised repeatedly as a labor of love in contrast to the AI-generated shovelware crowding the genre, held back by a short main story and real accessibility gaps including missing key remapping and a broken controller axis setting.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Roguelike RPGWindows PCmacOSLinux

Dungeonmans

A genuinely deep, absurdist-humor roguelike about attending an academy for professional dungeon-delvers, still receiving real content updates a decade after launch — tempered by a specific, punitive anti-exploit design choice reviewers describe as an overreaction, plus real accessibility complaints about unreadable UI text.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Fantasy Dungeon-Management RTSWindows PC

Dungeons 4

A dark-comedy dungeon-management RTS hybrid casting you as an evil overlord defending your lair and invading the overworld, praised by series fans as the most refined entry in Realmforge Studios' Dungeon Keeper-inspired series — criticized by others as too incremental over Dungeons 3 to justify full price, alongside a genuinely controversial forced EULA update.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Roguelite action platformerWindows PCmacOSLinux

Dungreed

Dungreed sends a lone adventurer into an endlessly regenerating dungeon to rescue a destroyed town, mixing roguelite runs with a persistent hub players slowly rebuild between attempts. Its loot variety and moment-to-moment combat earn steady, if modest, praise, while a cluster of specific complaints about controls, balance, and repetition follow it just as consistently.

6 / 10

Reviewed

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Retro fast-paced first-person shooterWindows PCmacOSLinux

DUSK

DUSK helped kickstart the retro "boomer shooter" revival, channeling Quake and Blood through three fast, blood-soaked campaign episodes. Its atmosphere and gunplay earn overwhelming praise, while a specific, recurring set of complaints targets particular enemies, a difficulty spike late in its second episode, and a save system some reviewers call genuinely frustrating.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Action, AdventureWindows PC

Duskfade

A genuinely loving, beautifully realised tribute to PS2-era 3D action platformers like Jak and Daxter, Kingdom Hearts and Ratchet & Clank, with movement, level design and a widely praised 40-track soundtrack that reviewers consistently single out as the game's clearest strength, badly let down by combat a large share of the same review base describes as flat, weightless and unrewarding, compounded by a missing key-rebinding option and no in-game map.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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