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 JRPG built around Velvet, one of the series' most distinctive and morally complicated protagonists, Very Positive across more than 14,000 reviews for its writing and cast — undercut by a remarkably consistent complaint that the combat and pacing underneath that story never matches its quality.
6.5 / 10
A Metroidvania-flavoured platformer about a shaman bargaining with the God of Death to bring his father's spirit back, built around switching between a melee Sun mask and a ranged Moon mask — praised by critics for its story and presentation, but met on Steam by a smaller, more linear game than its own marketing promised and a launch clouded by controversy that had little to do with combat at all.
6.5 / 10
Wētā Workshop's long-delayed, licensed hobbit life-sim finally arrived after two separate postponements and a publisher upheaval that saw its original label dissolved mid-development — and landed to a genuinely split reception, with an unusually large minority of its 3,783-review corpus describing a shallow, poorly optimised game that undersells both the cozy-sim genre and the setting it's licensed to use.
6 / 10
Read review of Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of The Rings Game
A gorgeous art-deco cyberpunk puzzle-narrative game about an AI balancing four warring factions to build the perfect city, whose short, tightly written story and striking presentation earn real affection, undercut by a confirmed lack of post-launch development and a content ceiling reviewers consistently describe as reached within just a few hours.
5.5 / 10
Turning brawlers into tactics, turtle by turtle Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown takes a genuine risk with one of gaming's most consistently arcade-brawler-shape
6.5 / 10
Read review of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown
A cozy, deceptively deep toy-train track-building puzzler filling the gap left by the long-unavailable Trainyard — genuinely massive content for its price and a developer with a strong post-launch track record, undercut for some buyers by a reported carryover of mobile-style purchase nag popups in the paid Steam release.
7.5 / 10
A musical conducting-puzzle game from Witch Beam, the studio behind Assault Android Cactus and Unpacking, with a score by BAFTA-winning composer Jeff van Dyck that draws near-unanimous, joyful praise — set against one detailed, well-argued dissent that the puzzles reward trial-and-error chaos more than the logical planning a comparable game like HUMANITY delivers.
7.5 / 10
A first-person Terminator RPG set during the "Future War" only glimpsed in the films, Very Positive across more than 16,000 reviews largely on the strength of licensed atmosphere — while a consistent, years-long thread argues the budget-tier production underneath that atmosphere is carrying the score more than the actual game design is.
5.5 / 10
A genuinely novel mashup of Tetris-style block placement and Slay the Spire-style deckbuilding, cheap and strategically satisfying in short bursts — undercut by a detailed, credible criticism that its "roguelike" node sequence and bosses are mostly fixed rather than randomized, and no updates since its first week.
6 / 10
A gorgeously animated, surreal Northern English comedy from a two-person Barnsley studio that won a BAFTA for British Game and drew a Metacritic score in the high 80s — loved by the large majority of its own huge Steam audience too, though a real, coherent minority argue its deliberately minimal "walk and slap" gameplay and distinctly regional humour don't stretch to fill even its brisk three-hour runtime.
8 / 10
A ground-up remake of Chilla's Art's cult job-sim horror game, widely praised by the studio's own dedicated fanbase as one of its strongest entries yet, undercut by genuinely severe optimisation problems that leave a game this small demanding surprisingly serious hardware to run smoothly.
6 / 10
A genuinely ambitious open-world vampire action RPG from Rebel Wolves, a new studio founded by Witcher 3 veterans, that fills a real gap for vampire-themed RPGs and draws strong, consistent praise for its story and atmosphere, undercut by widespread but hardware-inconsistent performance problems, real controller bugs, and a deeply divisive time-pressure mechanic that a large share of reviewers say was misrepresented before launch.
7 / 10
Cute drinks, creeping dread The Boba Teashop opens as exactly what its title promises: a small, cozy management game where you prepare boba tea drinks for a cast of pixel-art custo
6 / 10
A charming, cheap desktop-overlay farming idler set inside an antique snow globe, whose official store page advertises it as a "Full Idler" that runs independently — a specific claim directly contradicted by a detailed, recurring thread of reviewers reporting no real offline progression, save-loss crashes, and extremely slow pacing.
5.5 / 10
A genuinely alien, atmospheric open-world RPG that Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 22,000 reviews largely on the strength of its world design — and one whose own most devoted fans openly debate whether its RNG-based combat and journal-only quest tracking have aged into charm or into a real barrier depending on who's asking.
7.5 / 10
A solo-developer roguelite dungeon crawler that grew out of a beloved free Flash game — genuinely nostalgic and relaxing across a 94% Very Positive rating, though a consistent minority say the 100-floor climb flattens into repeating the same loop with bigger numbers long before the credits.
6.5 / 10
An addictive incremental deckbuilder with genuine engine-building satisfaction, undermined by a specifically documented paradox where unlocking more cards makes runs harder rather than easier, excessive randomness that multiple reviewers say defeats planning, and a developer practice of nerfing winning strategies that has frustrated players who worked hard to find them.
5.5 / 10
A one-time-purchase idle gacha RPG whose spotless, tiny English review sample hides a much larger, sustained body of Chinese-language reviews describing server outages, resource-gating that contradicts its own "no grind" marketing, and a store description that literally calls the game "Mobile Castle of Maiden" — a name that gives away more about its origins than the English listing does.
5 / 10
Two acclaimed writers, one enormous experiment The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- arrives with one of the more genuinely exciting premises in recent visual novel history: it&#
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed first-person survival-adventure whose launch was derailed by a viral TikTok describing a completely different game, followed by more than two years of the most aggressive, sustained performance-patching this review has seen from any single-developer release.
6 / 10
A third-person survival-horror shooter that paired a genuinely strong, well-received opening chapter with deep character customization, only for its long-awaited second chapter to land as a widely criticised step backward in pacing and enemy design that has visibly split its own fanbase.
6 / 10
A lovingly crafted homage to Monkey Island-era LucasArts adventures, following a young druid on a mission to save her grove — genuinely clever puzzle design and an award-nominated soundtrack, undercut by rough English localisation and the genre's classic sin of obscure, under-hinted puzzles.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeous, sprawling sci-fi metroidvania with genuinely creative traversal abilities, held back by a review sample that repeatedly and specifically argues its map, backtracking, and combat variety don't earn the length the game demands of them.
6 / 10
A storybook hero discovers he can leap out of his own 2D picture-book pages into a 3D world around them, in one of 2024's most visually inventive and BAFTA-nominated indies — beloved for a concept and presentation critics and players agree is genuinely special, and just as consistently described by a real slice of its adult audience as a game built for children first, with gameplay depth and stability to match.
7.5 / 10
