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.
Nicky Case's 2017 interactive explainer turns the iterated prisoner's dilemma into a 30-minute playable argument about why cooperation breaks down — and how it can be rebuilt — using nothing but a handful of tap-driven choices and a running tournament of computer opponents.
7.5 / 10
A minimalist turn-based survival game — you're the last black pawn, the white army closes in from every side each turn, and every move is a swipe. The touch controls are a full, confirmed parity with the keyboard; the in-game instructions screen, less so.
7 / 10
A Ludum Dare 58 puzzle where a single drag both places a tile and picks its colour by direction — a genuinely inventive one-gesture mechanic, confirmed working with a real touch drag, wrapped in a rough-edged 48-hour jam build with several non-blocking JavaScript errors.
7 / 10
A 13-kilobyte Mini Motorways reskin — swap roads for footpaths, cars for settlers, and traffic jams for hungry goats — that does the harder job properly by building its dragging around Pointer Events and giving its one desktop-only action a real tappable alternative.
7 / 10
A polished isometric traffic-light management game that placed 2nd in js13kGames 2013's Mobile category — a one-line viewport fix was needed to unlock it, but once applied, a tap precisely toggles the exact light under a finger, with a visible confirmation highlight.
8 / 10
A clean, well-built water-sorting puzzle across nine difficulty levels, with tap-to-pour touch controls confirmed working precisely - after fixing three real bugs in the shipped repository, including broken icon files and a dead reference to an external component the game doesn't actually need.
7.3 / 10
A clean, well-built word-categorization puzzle in the style of the NYT's Connections - sort sixteen words into four hidden groups of four - with tap-to-select and submit confirmed working correctly by touch after a broken Next.js export was fixed.
7.7 / 10
A faithful, no-nonsense Wordle clone with daily and random modes, whose full on-screen QWERTY keyboard was confirmed to type and submit guesses correctly by touch.
7.9 / 10
A Gamedev.js Jam 2025 honorable mention where you play two split-screen minigames at once — spot the typo, match the dance pose, balance the books, mow the lawn — all confirmed working through real on-screen buttons rather than gesture guesswork.
7 / 10
A meditative js13k 2020 entry about drawing a trail through a hand-illustrated world and looping it around things if you feel like it — no score pressure, no fail state, just a soft pastel scene and a line that follows your finger exactly where you take it.
7.5 / 10
One of 2024's most critically decorated narrative games — a Peabody Award nomination, an IGF Grand Prize shortlisting, a 90 on OpenCritic — telling a genre-blending story about clones, generational trauma and a pandemic-scarred future through the eyes of a devoted Watcher serving her ALLMOTHER, undercut for a small but genuinely coherent minority of players by exploration sections several call needlessly oversized for a game built almost entirely around its writing.
8.5 / 10
A lovingly crafted 16-bit sword-and-sorcery action platformer paying direct homage to Golden Axe, Rastan, and Castlevania, whose passionate nostalgic following and genuine level variety earn heartfelt praise, tempered by a widely and specifically repeated complaint that its sluggish movement speed persists even after a documented major update aimed at addressing it.
6 / 10
A dieselpunk mech-mining roguelite built as a spiritual successor to the classic Flash game Motherload, expanding its dig-and-sell loop with biomes, cave-ins, and New Game Plus, whose genuine improvements over the original earn strong nostalgic praise undercut by a real, specific chorus of complaints about imprecise digging controls, an unpopular late-game section, and at least one serious save-corruption bug.
6 / 10
Exactly what it says on the tin, for a while A Game About Digging A Hole is, true to its title, a game about digging a hole — manage your shovel and drill's battery, haul ore b
5.5 / 10
A solo-developer grand strategy map-painter spanning all of recorded history and beyond, whose real-time systems and accessible scale earn genuine praise against genre giants like Paradox's own titles, undercut by AI-generated leader portraits and a persistent, if partly outdated, sense that core features from its predecessor are still missing.
6 / 10
A genuinely excellent, critically acclaimed remaster of the beloved 2002 fantasy RTS, undercut by a pattern of anti-consumer decisions that has nothing to do with the strategy game underneath it — an always-online requirement briefly forced onto single-player campaigns, and gore content stripped at launch only to be sold back later as paid DLC.
7.5 / 10
A charming mining-and-crafting RPG that grew from a 2017 browser game into a genuinely loved 93%-positive Steam release, undercut by a widely repeated pattern where its beloved first island gives way to tedious inter-island travel and, for several players, a specific story event that destroys everything they built with no warning.
6.5 / 10
A first-person fantasy tavern-management sim built for up to six players — genuinely charming and enormously popular in co-op, with nearly two years of continuous free content updates, but shadowed by weak combat, thin solo content, and unresolved player suspicion about AI-generated dialogue and voice work.
7 / 10
A co-op horde shooter sequel that keeps the original's proven four-player Xenomorph-swarm formula largely intact, undermined by a rough technical launch of stuttering and connection issues, widely mocked dialogue writing, and a price many of its own fans say the added content doesn't justify.
5 / 10
A narrative messaging game about an operator exchanging real-time messages with a girl stranded in space a thousand years in the future, whose bold real-world waiting mechanic produces genuine, hard-won emotional impact for many players and a specific, credible set of frustrations for others.
6.5 / 10
A train that never stops The premise of All Aboard! The Train Defense Express is unusually specific, and that specificity is its best idea: your locomotive loops an endless, fixed
5.5 / 10
A charming, physics-based forging sandbox built on real metallurgy, where mixing over a hundred alloys and naming the spiders in your workshop is more the point than any pressure to optimise — genuinely loved by its players, though still Early Access after nearly two years and carrying real crash bugs and a documented unobtainable-achievement problem.
6.5 / 10
Trading, but the cargo fights back A Merchant's Promise starts you as, in its own words, a worthless merchant, and gives you exactly one asset: a rickety cart. The idea is stra
6 / 10
A stylish Katana Zero-adjacent parry-brawler with real visual and comedic charm, whose Overwhelmingly Positive reception masks a genuinely split critical response arguing the combat and level design don't hold up to the genre comparisons its own marketing invites.
6 / 10
