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 co-op sky-sailing survival sandbox from Bossa Studios -- spiritual successor to their abandoned MMO Worlds Adrift -- that pairs a genuinely loved grapple-and-shipbuilding core with a rushed five-month Early Access run, a save-corrupting bug streak that outlived the 1.0 launch, and a development pace that stalled for the better part of a year before recent fixes started landing.
5.5 / 10
A WWII-flavoured, zero-gravity spin on Escape from Tarkov that launched with real promise in 2022, then spent four years wearing down that goodwill through persistent cheating, contested bans, and — as of an April 2026 developer post apologising for "the silence" — a 20-month content drought.
5 / 10
A JRPG-flavoured roguelite auto-battler that pairs 3D diorama backdrops with pixel-art units and trait-based synergies, landing strong small-scale reviews for its combos even as players compare its interface unfavourably to the genre's biggest name.
7.5 / 10
A yandere-dating-sim premise that flips into psychological horror within its first minutes, and one of 2024's biggest indie viral hits — reviewed here with a specific, verifiable colorblind-accessibility gate its own community flagged, and a look at why a mostly-linear, five-hour game became a genre-defining moment anyway.
7.5 / 10
A generically titled creature-collector RPG whose own Steam DLC catalogue verifies a pay-to-win structure — pre-leveled Legendary monsters and permanent EXP boosters sold separately on top of a NZ$21.99 base price — reviewed on an almost nonexistent early audience whose own achievement data shows essentially no one progressing past the tutorial.
3 / 10
A free clicker-RPG hybrid with real equipment-crafting depth behind the big damage numbers, whose own developer has now documented, in public and in unusually plain language, why it launched rocky, never recovered, and was abandoned nine months later.
5 / 10
A genetics-driven frog-breeding sim from one half of the APICO team, built around discovering and cross-breeding dozens of frog species across a waking and a dreaming world -- beautifully drawn and warmly received, with real friction in its navigation, inventory and pacing that a year and a half of updates hasn't fully resolved.
8 / 10
A NZ$10.29 desk-diorama ant colony sim from a solo student developer, launched unfinished on 1 April 2022 (unintentionally, on April Fools), publicly apologised for, patched twice over the following five months, and then left behind — a review from November 2023 says the developer "completely abandoned" it, and the game's own tiny nine-review corpus backs that up.
3 / 10
A neon-pixel run-and-gun roguelite that wears its Binding of Isaac influence openly and well enough to earn Strong critical reviews and a Very Positive Steam score, though a real share of players say the grindy unlock structure and a shrinking item pool wear thin faster than the genre's best.
7 / 10
Nomada Studio's follow-up to the beloved GRIS is gorgeous by near-universal agreement and just as consistently marked down by its own fans for one specific addition — combat — that a majority of its detailed critics say undercuts the emotional, puzzle-led magic that made its predecessor a modern classic.
7.5 / 10
A party-based steampunk-versus-magic RPG that launched into Early Access with real Arcanum and Baldur's Gate 3 comparisons in its favor — and then, by this review's full read of its negative sample and its own public patch history, went almost a year without a real content update, turning early "great potential" reviews into a wave of "the game is dead."
4.5 / 10
Team Ninja's samurai-era Souls-like pairs one of the deepest stance-based combat systems in the genre with a Diablo-style loot flood that a large, vocal share of its own fans say fights against everything the combat is trying to do -- a disagreement that hasn't moved in nine years of reviews.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely satisfying Klondike gold-rush mining tycoon sim from a studio whose previous Early Access title was abandoned and delisted — a history that shadows this one every time a years-old bug resurfaces or a new paid DLC lands on what a chunk of the audience still calls beta.
6.5 / 10
A darkly satirical colony sim crossed with a first-person roguelite shooter, where you build a totalitarian regime and personally lead mechanised assaults against alien threats — a strong Early Access launch overshadowed for some players by the game's previous life as an NFT-funded project called Earth From Another Sun.
7 / 10
The Phantom Thieves trade the Metaverse for a grid-based tactics spin-off, carrying over Baton Pass and weakness-exploiting combat into cover-based skirmishes. Sharp presentation and a near-unanimously praised soundtrack sit on top of a short campaign that most of its own reviewers say is priced for a much longer game.
6.5 / 10
A dark-comedy business simulator about running an online drug empire, launched into Early Access in January 2023 by solo developer PiCorp and left there, seemingly untouched, ever since.
4 / 10
A NZ$6.95 Vampire Survivors-style bullet-heaven from Amrita, Very Positive across 470 lifetime reviews but carrying a consistent, dated accusation from its own players — 19 of the 52 most-helpful English negatives name Vampire Survivors directly, several call it a near-identical asset-flip, and the developer's own patch history shows active Early Access support stopping the moment 1.0 shipped in February 2023, replaced since by two entirely new games from the same studio.
5.5 / 10
A solo-developer Early Access roguelite deckbuilder that casts you as a corrupt politician climbing from community leader to world leader, with fast five-to-ten-minute campaigns, a satirical Bloc-management system and cross-run meta-progression — reviewed here on a genuinely tiny early sample, but every one of the reviews it does have recommends it.
6.5 / 10
One of the finest metroidvanias in years, nearly universally loved on its own merits and just as consistently marked down by its own players for a mandatory Ubisoft Connect launcher — a friction so persistent it's still generating complaints in 2026, on a game whose acclaimed development team Ubisoft disbanded within weeks of release after a sequel was refused.
8 / 10
A solo-developed Roman city builder that pits Caesar 3-style urban planning against the Hydra, the Minotaur and Cerberus -- a striking-looking game whose 1.0 launch, six months after it started, split its own audience between "finally complete" and "rushed and abandoned."
6 / 10
A falling-sand physics factory game — every grain, drop and spark is a simulated resource — that went into Early Access on 13 August 2026 to a near-unanimous reception, backed by Hooded Horse and pre-release press comparing it to Factorio, Terraria and Noita all at once.
8 / 10
A "Hades meets Monster Hunter" action roguelite from a small team at Ankama, the studio behind Dofus and Wakfu, built around slower, methodical part-breaking combat rather than fast Hades-style dodging -- Very Positive across 236 English reviews for its art and weapon-swap mechanics, but dogged from launch through mid-2026 by thin initial content and hit-detection complaints that a full year of free updates hasn't fully resolved.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developer idle/incremental game about growing a server farm from a battered laptop to planet-scale compute — three genuinely distinct minigames, a finite Singularity ending that Steam's own achievement data shows a striking share of players actually reach, and no microtransactions or ads anywhere on a NZ$4.79 price tag.
8 / 10
Asymmetric's prohibition-era, Lovecraft-flavoured follow-up to the award-winning West of Loathing -- Overwhelmingly Positive on its own considerable merits, with a review sample so consistently framed against its beloved predecessor that "not quite West of Loathing" is practically this game's second title.
8 / 10
