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 terminal-based hacking simulator with a story campaign that real cybersecurity professionals credit with reasonable, simplified authenticity, tempered by widely reported missing basic terminal functionality, an officially disclosed use of AI-generated portrait art, and a story structure more linear and scripted than its marketing implies.
6 / 10
A turn-based RPG built around a distinctive wooden-puppet aesthetic and a deliberate, loving homage to Super Mario RPG's timed-hit combat, pitched by its own fans as a genuinely harder successor to that formula — and criticized by an equally vocal minority for demanding precise reflexes over strategic depth, with a lack of an in-game map drawing complaints from both camps.
6.5 / 10
A beautiful, hostile hole in the ground Anoxia Station drops you into a subterranean mining operation on a dying world, tasked with extracting resources, managing a crew, and confr
5.5 / 10
Balatro, but the deck is a mahjong wall Aotenjo: Infinite Hands takes the roguelike deckbuilding formula Balatro popularised — a run-based structure built around escalating scoring
6 / 10
A charming, genuinely addictive fantasy shopkeeper sim whose own fans and critics independently agree it underdelivers on its own "arcane" premise and feels railroaded and unfinished for a full-price release, compounded by multiple reviewers stating the game uses AI-generated art as fact and one detailed, serious, unverified allegation that specific NPC outfits were lifted from Baldur's Gate 3.
5 / 10
A deliberately, defiantly weird narrative cooking game about frying eggs and cigarettes for a bewildered post-apocalyptic Antarctic settlement, whose jazz-soaked atmosphere and go-for-broke commitment to its own strangeness wins over most players who try it, undercut for others by a genuinely frustrating physics-based cooking mechanic and a scattering of real technical bugs.
6.5 / 10
Everything simulator, but set at the top of the world Arctic Motel Simulator's pitch, according to one reviewer's paraphrase of its own creation story, amounts to: "wh
6.5 / 10
A pixel-art hero-collecting beat-em-up/ARPG that mixes River City Girls-style combat with a Fate-adjacent time-travelling cast — genuinely satisfying once its early bugs are patched out, and backed by one of the more responsive small-studio support records in this year's lane.
7 / 10
A genuinely original colony-sim/tower-defense hybrid about building a fortress on the back of a walking World Tree — sticky enough to hook dedicated fans for hundreds of hours, but shipped to 1.0 with a game-breaking defense bug and balance problems the developer appears to have stopped fixing entirely.
5 / 10
A handsome, handcrafted maze-building tower defense whose 30 meticulously designed levels are exactly the point for genre veterans hunting a genuine puzzle challenge, and exactly the problem for players expecting the freeform strategic experimentation the genre usually promises.
6 / 10
A Banner Saga-inspired tactical RPG whose launch-era combat system was so widely and specifically criticised that the developer rebuilt it from scratch six years later — a rare case where a genre's most common complaint about a game was actually addressed, even if the reworked result still lands as Mixed for new reasons.
6 / 10
An unusually ambitious solo-developer Melvor Idle-style RPG, with real class variety and a developer reviewers repeatedly praise for same-day bug fixes, undercut by widely criticized machine-translated localization, a cluttered interface, and a specific, repeated, unverified reviewer concern that its writing and translation were produced with undisclosed AI assistance.
6 / 10
A solo-developed space idler that does something the genre rarely does — deliberately ends, in ten to twelve hours across two modes — and largely delivers on that promise, though reviewers argue about whether "idle" is even the right word for it.
7 / 10
A satirical Pokemon-flavored auto-battler roguelite whose "just one more run" charm and genuine humor are undercut by a near-total lack of persistent meta-progression, a small handful of dominant builds, and a completion rate so low it confirms just how punishing the game actually is beneath its jokey exterior.
6 / 10
Bennett Foddy's follow-up to Getting Over It replaces a hammer and a pot with a pair of legs you have to consciously place one step at a time — a deliberately, meticulously frustrating physics-walking game whose review corpus is full of players who say they hate it, hate the developers for making it, and are recommending it anyway.
7 / 10
A genuinely inventive PvP inventory-management auto-battler that grew from an itch.io demo into one of 2024's biggest indie breakout hits, undermined for a real and vocal share of its huge, dedicated player base by unaddressed high-rank cheating, a meta that narrows to the same cookie-cutter builds, and repeated, independently corroborated reports of players being banned from official community channels simply for raising these complaints.
6 / 10
Supergiant Games' hand-painted debut about a shattered world and the narrator who comments on your every move, still Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 28,000 reviews — and one where a consistent minority of players describe the art and narration as carrying a combat loop and story structure that never quite lives up to them.
7.5 / 10
A Kickstarter-funded retro platformer that pairs a genuinely charming sports-sentai premise with Mega Man and Shovel Knight-inspired action, consistently praised as competent and polished rather than exceptional — and dogged by a handful of specific, occasionally progression-blocking bugs.
7 / 10
A genuinely original hive-defense base-builder — arm your bees with ballistae and anti-aircraft rockets against escalating hornet raids — landing Very Positive on the strength of its concept, despite shipping as a full release with the rough edges, missing information, and persistent bugs reviewers usually forgive only in Early Access.
6.5 / 10
Build an empire, ask what the Boss would do Beff Jezos Simulator wraps a fairly standard online-retail tycoon loop — source products, price them, fulfil orders, hire staff, expand
5 / 10
A Mega Man Battle Network-flavoured desktop idle RPG whose Very Positive lifetime score needs an asterisk — a detailed, timestamped review posted the day after launch documents a Discord channel where players reportedly traded review screenshots for in-game currency, an allegation the reviewer says the developer initially responded to in a way that acknowledged the practice before deleting the response.
5 / 10
A cheerful rock-smashing incremental that launched short enough to draw "paid demo" complaints — until a solo developer's single big update, naming the complaint directly, roughly tripled its length.
6.5 / 10
A physics-driven puzzle-platformer built around a genuinely inventive object-swapping mechanic, drawing constant and earned Limbo/Inside comparisons for its opening hours — before a large, independently-corroborated share of its own admirers say the same handful of skills get tested over and over for six to eight more hours than the ideas actually support.
6.5 / 10
A NZ$2.99 desktop pet from Salt Fish Studio that reacts to your keyboard and mouse in real time and rewards ordinary computer use with hundreds of collectible cosmetics, pitched by reviewers as a more customizable, Steam Workshop-backed successor to Bongo Cat, with an almost entirely positive but genuinely thin dissenting record.
7 / 10
