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 star-studded branching horror anthology from the Until Dawn team that splits its own reviewers on story quality and delivers far less mechanical agency than its "your choices matter" framing implies, launched alongside a broken multiplayer promise and now caught up in the same 2K Terms of Service controversy documented independently on the publisher's other 2022 release.
6.5 / 10
A turn-based roguelite that reviewers keep describing the same way — "Octopath Traveler meets Slay the Spire" — with a genuinely distinctive height-based combat system underneath. Two days into Early Access it's fighting real launch bugs, but few Early Access debuts respond to their players this fast or this openly.
6.5 / 10
A gorgeous pixel-art stealth metroidvania with a wonderful narrator and a genuinely distinctive Prince of Persia-meets-Mark-of-the-Ninja premise, undone by softlocking bugs that dominate its review corpus and, per an official patch history showing exactly one fix in fifteen months, appear to have gone largely unaddressed.
5 / 10
An expanded, engine-rebuilt reimagining of 2013's landmark narrative game, still regarded as one of the most original and cleverly written pieces of interactive fiction ever made — its only real, substantive criticism, buried under an avalanche of in-character joke reviews, comes from longtime fans questioning whether the new content justifies a doubled price for people who already own the original.
8.5 / 10
A gorgeous, ambitious philosophical puzzle sequel that expands everything the original did, which a large and vocal share of veteran fans argue is exactly the problem — bigger worlds, more dialogue and easier puzzles than the tight, focused original they loved.
7.5 / 10
A charming, gorgeously realised 3D exploration game about being shrunk down inside an ordinary suburban house, whose near-unanimous acclaim sits on top of a small but consistent minority report that the collecting loop underneath the charm doesn't have much depth once the novelty wears off.
7.5 / 10
A deliberately old-school highway battle racer from series creator Genki, returning after 18 years with an honest, monetisation-free business model its fans celebrate almost as much as the driving itself — sitting alongside a real, persistent complaint about rubberbanding AI and repetitive race structure that spans the whole year from Early Access into full release.
7.5 / 10
Widely regarded as one of the finest entries in the entire Total War series, still Overwhelmingly Positive nearly two decades on — its negative sample is thin and scattered rather than dominated by one crisis, split between expected age-related technical friction, a historical 2019 regional price-hike controversy, and a small, fresh cluster of Steam-client launch failures in late 2025.
8.5 / 10
Widely regarded as the best-received entry in the Total War series (Metacritic 90) and still Very Positive on Steam — but a May 2023 update that stripped multiplayer chat, broke the Mod Manager and invalidated saves on a beloved 12-year-old game triggered a wave of protest reviews that, unlike similar incidents elsewhere in this outlet's library, remains unresolved through 2026.
7.5 / 10
One of the best-regarded entries in the Total War series on release, built around a genuinely deep diplomacy system and two distinct ways to play — undercut by a 2019 modding censorship controversy tied to a Chinese-market publishing deal, a DLC roadmap reviewers say Creative Assembly abandoned before finishing the story it promised, and persistent crash bugs still reported years later.
7 / 10
A widely loved grand-strategy classic whose negative sample documents a real 2018 spyware scandal, persistent Denuvo/always-online friction, and a heavily criticised DLC structure requiring ownership of a separate game to access its best campaign mode — a complaint Creative Assembly substantially resolved in December 2025 by giving Warhammer III free to owners.
8 / 10
A single-tower roguelite defense game with a genuinely neat central hook — build and upgrade one tower instead of placing many — undercut at launch by narrow build viability, a cramped view window and a price several of its own fans said was too high for what shipped.
5.5 / 10
A sci-fi roguelite built around a genuinely inventive parallel-universe fusion mechanic, praised for its art and animation, undercut by controls a large share of reviewers describe as unresponsive and floaty next to genre benchmark Dead Cells, plus real progression-blocking bugs that outlasted the patch meant to fix them.
6 / 10
A viral internet joke that turned out to hide a genuinely inventive rhythm game underneath — you slide a mouse to actually play the melody rather than just hitting notes on a track — backed by more than three years of sustained free updates that answered its players' biggest requests one at a time.
8 / 10
A six-person Korean studio's XCOM-meets-Final-Fantasy-Tactics SRPG that has quietly built one of the most devoted fanbases in the genre — thousands of hours logged by individual reviewers, a mastery system deep enough to write wikis about, and a developer who reportedly replies to nearly every single Steam review personally, all wrapped around a translation reviewers compare unfavourably to the internet's most infamous mistranslation meme.
7.5 / 10
A horse-girl training sim whose warm writing and addictive racing loop won it Best Mobile Game at the 2025 Game Awards, sitting alongside one of the harsher gacha economies its own players have documented in detail — no pity carrying between banners, no guaranteed top-rarity pull even at the pity ceiling — plus a real, dated controversy wave over the developer's January 2026 announcement of a dedicated generative-AI studio.
7 / 10
A free-to-play survival MMORPG whose zombie-apocalypse crafting loop has a genuine, deeply invested fanbase, undercut by a barely-adapted mobile interface and a monetisation structure reviewers document in granular, specific detail — including a viral account of a single player spending over $2,000.
5 / 10
A visual-novel-first tactical RPG that opens a respected trilogy, where reviewers overwhelmingly praise the emotional storytelling and world-building and just as consistently admit the tactical battles are the least interesting part of the package.
7 / 10
DONTNOD's narrative vampire-RPG draws real praise for its moral choice system and atmospheric London setting, undercut by a genuinely clunky combat system that's the single most common complaint in this outlet's sample, and a deliberate "commit to your choices" single-save design that several reviewers describe compounding real bugs into permanent, un-fixable stuck states.
6.5 / 10
A free browser-turned-Steam idle MMORPG whose day-one launch put brand-new players into the same PvP world as six-month veterans past level 4,000 — fixed within 24 hours by a fast, transparent developer response, but sitting alongside monetisation and design complaints that haven't gone away since.
4 / 10
A deeply personal, one-to-two-hour narrative cooking game about a Tamil family immigrating to Canada, whose story draws exceptional, culturally specific praise even from critics who otherwise dock it hard for a runtime and cooking mechanic reviewers consistently argue don't match its original asking price.
7.5 / 10
A minimalist top-down Souls-like that strips the genre down to timed dodges, stamina management and hard-won shortcuts, earning near-universal praise for its distillation of the formula while a real minority of even its own fans admit the moment-to-moment feel never quite clicked for them.
8 / 10
A narrative "cozy" tea-shop game from The Stanley Parable creator's studio that deliberately refuses catharsis in favour of sitting with discomfort — a design choice its own highest-voted review frames precisely as "this is therapy, not catharsis," which a substantial minority of players found genuinely frustrating rather than illuminating, especially a mechanic that wipes everything a player has built at the end of every act.
8 / 10
A janky, PS2-throwback sword-and-gunplay action game that split opinion at launch and has just weathered a fresh, verified controversy of its own — a retroactive, initially undisclosed swap to AI-adjusted store page art that the developer has since publicly disclosed and clarified doesn't touch the actual game.
5.5 / 10
