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.
Obsidian's pirate-flavoured CRPG sequel draws real praise for its writing and open-sea setting, but "combat" is the single most-discussed word in its negative reviews — and one detailed review sums up a whole pattern in the corpus: 100+ hours logged, and still never finished.
7 / 10
A free-to-play naval PvP autobattler with real, specific tactical depth reviewers enjoy, undercut by a strong, repeated pay-to-win throughline and a Steam release several reviewers say quietly reuses a years-old mobile game without disclosing it.
4.3 / 10
The roguelike that Shattered Pixel Dungeon forked from, sold on Steam by the original creator himself — as a largely untouched 2015 mobile port with a decade-old bug its own store page still doesn't mention.
6.5 / 10
One of the most acclaimed RPGs ever written, still holding a 94.4% lifetime score nine years into its Beamdog remaster — and its own recent reviewers are refreshingly honest that the combat everyone warns you about really is the weak point, not a myth built by contrarians.
8 / 10
A Two Point Hospital-flavoured prison-management sim with genuine charm and a supportive launch window, undercut by thin long-term content, a restrictive early economy, and a developer that stopped updating it in August 2022 — confirmed by a news feed gone quiet and a concurrent-player count in the single digits.
5 / 10
A cheap, pleasant, two-to-four-hour fishing incremental from Monkey Cube that plenty of players finish in one sitting and enjoy — right up until they notice the upgrade tree never actually asks them to choose anything, and that the endgame achievements want them to play the whole thing over again.
6 / 10
A free MMO racer with a genuine lineage back to 2006, relaunched on Steam in 2019 — reviewed for what a new player actually finds when they arrive, including how few of them there currently are.
5.5 / 10
A NZ$3.19 minimalist block-breaking puzzle that dresses each stage up as a psychological phenomenon — anxiety, ADHD, perfectionism, obsession. The idea is more interesting than the evidence that it actually pays off; the entire public record on this three-month-old release is two Steam reviews, split exactly down the middle.
5.6 / 10
A free 2018 city-building idler, and the earliest of solo developer Aleksandr Golovkin's three Steam idle games — genuine strategic depth in its building trees and "Assimilation" prestige system, undercut by save-corrupting crashes that go back to launch week and a game the developer stopped touching for content in August 2018.
4.5 / 10
A tiny, sincere space-RTS built around a genuinely original hook — gravity wells and time dilation as tactical tools — undercut by a clunky interface and thin content that its own players, split exactly down the middle, can't agree on.
5.3 / 10
A "Dark Souls but with guns" sequel widely loved for its procedurally varied worlds and co-op — undercut at launch by a performance controversy specific to its era, with reviewers treating "built with DLSS in mind" as corporate cover for skipped optimisation.
7 / 10
A bare-bones restaurant management sim with no missions, goals, or real progression loop, compounded by crashes and a broken autosave, and one detailed reviewer's unverified claim that the developer may not have built the game's assets themselves.
2.6 / 10
A solo-developed arena bullet heaven where you upgrade a hover tank instead of a runner, fighting inside five hazard-filled arenas instead of an endless field. Sharp neon presentation, a shallow upgrade tree, and a leaderboard that keeps a small but dedicated audience coming back.
7 / 10
A traditional roguelike that dresses ADOM- and Tales of Maj'Eyal-style permadeath dungeon-crawling in a friendlier interface and a satisfying meta-progression loop, held back by thin originality, patchy quality-of-life and a scattering of run-ending bugs.
7 / 10
A 2014 mashup of Doom-era corridor shooting and roguelike permadeath, still recognisable as an ancestor of the boomer-shooter roguelite boom — and still carrying a decade of unpatched jank to prove it.
6 / 10
A solo Roman-themed deckbuilder that plays less like an evolving campaign and more like ten separate puzzles built from the same box of cards — with a Cats reskin thrown in for a second look at the same missions.
6.8 / 10
A solo German developer's Diablo-flavoured dwarf brawler — six to nine hours of hammer combos and procedurally reshuffled dungeons for about the price of a coffee, with no co-op and a combat system that occasionally fights the player as hard as the monsters do.
6.8 / 10
Meteor Forge's solo-developed launch grafts a Slay the Spire-style build ladder onto a physics pinball table — 50+ balls, 60+ artifacts and an ascension climb that early players clearly love, held back by an interface that won't explain itself and only three tables to play it on.
7.2 / 10
A viral, streamer-bait "brainrot" horror sequel whose joke-review culture masks a real, substantive complaint underneath — no save feature at all, and a reproducible puzzle bug that can block progress outright.
4.7 / 10
A genuinely clever, Tim Burton-esque co-op puzzle-platformer that both sides of its review sample agree only really works with a second player — solo mode, camera clarity, and general polish all draw the same specific, repeated complaints over a decade after release.
6 / 10
A budget-priced, GUI-driven text adventure about a writer and his blind father moving into a small town with a Twin Peaks-shaped secret — long on atmosphere and prose, short on how much your choices actually change.
6.5 / 10
Fishing Cactus takes the Flash-era Shift games they helped build in 2008 and turns them into a full cyber-noir puzzle-platformer, with a level editor that outlasts the campaign — and a few real rough edges around connectivity and price.
7.2 / 10
A NZ$3.74 solo-scale mining clicker from Kitty Games — eight upgrade tiers, a New Game Plus prestige loop that unlocks passive buildings, an Endless Mode and combinable difficulty mods, all narrated by a snarky fox in a top hat — checked against its own store data and a six-review sample rather than played.
6.5 / 10
A genuinely well-regarded airport-management sim with a distinct, ground-handling-focused concept praised even by many critics, confirmed abandoned by this review's own check of a three-year Steam news silence — leaving a real, unfinished game for sale with no further development in sight.
3.4 / 10
