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.
Afil Games' budget arena survivor puts a gladiator through waves of beasts and rivals with seven selectable weapons and stack-your-own-build upgrades. It's cheap and the hook works for a while, but a defense-stacking exploit, a stuck small window and a three-year-old broken achievement drag it down.
4.5 / 10
A one-developer gladiator hack-and-slash that launched in 2018 as a stripped-down single-player sliver of a much bigger multiplayer Roman-arena RPG its own official website still describes as "upcoming" and "in alpha" — three Steam reviews total, and the one detailed negative report says the settings menu doesn't work.
3.2 / 10
A calm, procedurally generated Finnish-mythology city-builder about goblins, water and the turning of the seasons — recently out of two years of Early Access, and still short on the reasons to keep watching after your first winter.
6.4 / 10
BitBorne Studio's co-op mining survival game sends up to four goblins into a destructible mine with laser drills, rail carts and a darkness-drains-your-sanity torch system. Two months after launch it's Very Positive on Steam for exactly the reason its own reviewers keep repeating — brilliant with friends, rough around nearly every edge.
7 / 10
A decade-refined mobile hit about reading a rival's mood in a pizza order — charming, funny, and still selling the same diamonds it sold on your phone.
6.7 / 10
Read review of Good Pizza, Great Pizza - Cooking Simulator Game
A mobile idle-grind game ported to Steam with its microtransactions stripped but its free-to-play repetition intact — genuinely fun in short, cheap-sale bursts, but widely described as overpriced for what's essentially a phone game with crash bugs and missing sound effects.
4 / 10
An ambitious colonial-fantasy RPG from a small studio that reviewers consistently describe as two different games — a genuinely great opening act, and a back half of repetitive fetch quests that several fans only got through with the help of community mods.
6.5 / 10
SoftCowGames' free tower-defense idler has a real early hook — upgrade a castle, unlock weapon tiers, farm bosses for legendary loot — but years of player reviews describe the same save-corruption bugs, a 10%-only offline rate and shop pricing that turns "just cosmetic" into a running joke.
5.2 / 10
A hexagonal match-3 board wired to real RPG stats and live PvP is a genuinely clever hook, but Ino-Co Plus buries it under slow pacing, undertaught systems and a monetisation menu that several of its own players call pay-to-win.
5.5 / 10
A solo developer's big swing at a character-action game — combo routes, a fury-meter super mode and 10-15 hours of heavy-metal cinematics — sold alongside 34 separate paid DLC listings, including a premium currency duplicated across five near-identical SKUs per tier.
3.7 / 10
The rough, dated first entry in a long-running hidden-object franchise, with a genuinely interesting premise buried under low-resolution graphics, unremovable text, and repetitive puzzle design that reviewers consistently say hasn't aged well.
3.4 / 10
A genuinely likeable spin on the House-Flipper renovation genre, with a real ghost-catching hook reviewers enjoyed for months — undercut by severe, persistent bugs and a rights transfer to a new studio that this review independently confirmed via a year of Steam silence, exactly matching multiple reviewers' abandonment claims.
3.2 / 10
A genuinely charming, actively supported Sanrio cozy-life-sim that became a real viral phenomenon, undercut by real mobile-port friction on price and time-gating, and a documented monetisation reversal that a meaningful share of its own most dedicated players say broke trust.
6.7 / 10
A prequel that nails the "one more turn" feeling of Heroes III closely enough to sell a million copies in a month — while its own most-upvoted critical review, from a fan who loves it, argues the developers have spent their post-launch effort on competitive PvP while single-player AI and the number-one requested feature, team co-op, keep waiting.
7 / 10
An imaginative premise — a giant mobile castle fleeing monsters across an open world — sold at an extraordinary NZ$289.99, which this review's own check of Steam's public records shows spent roughly six years in Early Access before quietly "leaving" it in 2024 with a single achievement and, by ten of eleven reviewers' accounts, barely a tutorial's worth of content.
1.8 / 10
A cheap first-person horror game with a couple of genuinely effective jump scares, sunk by a punishing, checkpoint-free trial-and-error structure and widely repeated accusations of being an asset-flip built from stock assets rather than an original production.
3.7 / 10
Cold Hours' free pixel-art clicker nails a charming opening few hours, then buries its own idle promise under an offline-time cap, an autoclicker-favouring economy and a premium currency that gates full completion.
5.5 / 10
A free-to-play boat-and-crew idler with 1,215 Steam achievements and a genuinely active two-year patch history, undercut by a store-page AI Generated Content Disclosure and a bolt-on excavation system that its own achievement data shows almost nobody finishes.
6.5 / 10
A cheap, no-frills automated-combat idle RPG from a developer who has released more than a dozen very similar games — genuinely relaxing for players who just want numbers to climb, undercut by a total lack of offline progress and a review base too thin and too non-English to lean on with confidence.
4.8 / 10
A NZ$10.49 idle-summon-and-defend game from solo Chinese developer CMY that has spent eight months on sale with almost no trace of a community — one lifetime Steam review, zero concurrent players at time of writing, and a store page whose own data (an identical icon on all seven achievements, a machine-translated description, mismatched tags) argues for caution more clearly than any review score could.
4.3 / 10
A NZ$14.99 monster-staffed factory idler from Eragone, the solo French studio behind Idle Together — checked against a review base of exactly 15 write-ups, every one of them positive, and all but one written months before the game's actual 1.0 release.
7 / 10
A NZ$1.49 clicker-idler that strips the genre down to a single warrior fighting an endless line of enemies, with just enough achievement structure to hold completionists — and just little enough content to leave everyone else asking what happened after 2021.
5.2 / 10
A fifteen-year-old browser empire-builder that finally came to Steam in 2017 and went fully free-to-play in 2021 — Illyriad's 400+ technologies and player-run economy reward the kind of patience most modern strategy games no longer ask for, but its Steam premium account duplicates what the original site gives away, and "Grand Strategy MMO" undersells just how much of this is Tribal Wars with a research tree bolted on.
6.5 / 10
A free idle RPG where automated heroes grind an endless dungeon and three stacked prestige layers turn the numbers exponential — sharp and generous early on, then quietly hollowed out by the same "just maximise damage" problem that hits most of the genre.
6.5 / 10
