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 souls-like that launched broken and clawed its way to "Mostly Positive" through two years of relentless post-launch support — only to reopen the wound in 2026 by bolting on kernel-level anti-cheat that a fresh wave of reviewers say they can no longer trust.
6.5 / 10
A deep, one-time-purchase game-development tycoon that over 2,300 English reviewers rate more highly than its own predecessor — as long as you're happy solving its systems rather than expressing yourself through them.
8 / 10
Albireo Games' cheap, no-frills tile-matching solitaire does exactly what its title promises and nothing else — pleasant enough for a short sitting, but its own players report a shuffle algorithm that regularly hands out unsolvable boards.
4.5 / 10
A simplified, buggier follow-up to the well-regarded Mars Colony: Challenger, with real crashing and missing-feature complaints and no updates recorded since 2016 — and a recent reviewer tribute revealing the game's solo developer passed away in December 2025 after a long illness, which this review treats with the care that context deserves.
4 / 10
A Cold War-flavoured tower defense about zombies on Mars, where the tension comes from physically running crew between turrets — and where the loudest, most consistent complaint in its review history is that every mission has exactly one correct build order.
6 / 10
A NZ$7.45 wave shooter spun off from Nightbinder's budget Masked Forces series, swapping the franchise's PvP arenas for zombie hordes. The core shooting loop still works nine years on, but Steam's own player-count API returns zero, so the PvP and co-op the store page advertises exist mostly on paper.
5.2 / 10
Infamous for one of gaming's most viral bad launches — the animation bugs — Andromeda's own reviewers agree the real, lasting problem was never the glitches but a story they call the weakest in the series, now sold for NZ$9.99.
6 / 10
A genuinely deep, satisfying custom weapon-forging simulator wrapped in a dark, divisive narrative — undercut by a specific, severe structural flaw where wrong dialogue choices can permanently end a save with no warning, and unverified reviewer allegations of AI-generated content.
5.3 / 10
A three-person studio's ambitious mash-up of Total War sieges, Stronghold-style town building and a Crusader Kings-flavoured campaign map — held back by a jittery frame rate, a threadbare interface and a developer now selling the same idea for the fourth time.
5.8 / 10
A budget merge-and-defend hybrid from a small Dutch studio that has released the same basic loop under half a dozen names. Four years after launch, it has collected precisely zero Steam user reviews — and the design explains why.
4.3 / 10
A NZ$3.19 merge-idler about evolving cats through drag-and-drop merges — clean on monetisation, but backed by so little player evidence (two English Steam reviews in four years, zero concurrent players at time of writing) that its own storefront can't muster a score.
4 / 10
A casual mini-game collection with a genuinely decent underlying concept, undercut by a messy, buggy implementation reviewers say is at times dreadful, a specific level-73 bug that can block completion, and a widely repeated claim that it largely reuses assets from its own predecessor.
3.2 / 10
A beloved, free five-minute novelty where you spend humanity's last minute kissing or punching your way through a comic-strip apocalypse — overwhelmingly loved for exactly what it is, with its small negative minority mostly wishing there were simply more of it.
6.8 / 10
A busier, more mechanically ambitious sibling to Holyday City Reloaded, wrapped around a King Midas fantasy — but its optional events lean harder into gambling than its stablemate ever did, and its last patch predates that game's too.
5.8 / 10
Home to one of the most inventive systems in action RPGs — a system its publisher then patented, blocking every other studio from building anything like it, a decision reviewers are still angry about years after the studio that made it, Monolith Productions, was shut down.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely well-regarded hidden-object mystery with strong art and atmosphere, undercut by a single, dominant, decade-old problem — broken Steam achievements that this review confirmed the developer never fixed, alongside real resolution and scaling issues on modern displays.
5.1 / 10
A Windows-98-styled incremental about building a weapons manufacturer from a single hand-cranked bullet press to a nuke, undone late by an achievement wave that broke 100% completion for a lot of the players who loved it most.
6.5 / 10
A NZ$7.39 solo-developer auto-battler about placing mercenaries in a small arena and watching the fight resolve — a coherent, fairly priced take on a crowded subgenre that has spent nearly eight months on Steam without attracting a single user review.
5.5 / 10
A charming, Pokemon-inspired monster-collection game with a genuinely fun core loop that its tiny review sample still enjoys — held back by real, repeated UI and control complaints that several reviewers feel give it an unfinished, Early-Access-adjacent feel despite shipping as a full release.
5.5 / 10
A free, short VR "edutainment" trip to a lunar base that genuinely charms the players who can get it working, undercut by severely inconsistent controller support that leaves a large share of reviewers unable to turn, move, or even start the experience at all.
3 / 10
A genuinely unsettling psychological horror story about grief and identity, praised even by its critics for atmosphere and sound design, undercut by one specific, near-universally disliked mechanic gating its true ending — an apple-picking replay loop several fans single out by name as the game's one real flaw.
7 / 10
A short, simple, family-friendly hidden-object mystery that most reviewers on both sides of the aggregate agree is enjoyable while it lasts — but too brief and too generic in its story for many to call it worth the full asking price.
5.8 / 10
A visually appealing mobile-derived hidden-object game, actively maintained with monthly updates, gated by an energy system nearly every negative reviewer says limits sessions to 10-15 minutes before demanding real money — including two independent, extremely long-tenured players who allege the game adapts its difficulty to spending behaviour, a claim this review could not verify but is reporting plainly given who's making it.
3.8 / 10
A roguelike deckbuilder with a genuinely clever hook — you choose which enemy attack hits you — trapped inside a game that left Early Access unfinished in February 2023 and hasn't been updated since.
5 / 10
