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 solo-developer campus-management sim with an unusually specific pitch — schedule real courses and sections, build dorms, hire professors, chase reputation — undercut by a launch-week save bug, support that appears to have stopped within days of release, and Steam's own achievement data showing almost nobody gets past the opening hour.
4.6 / 10
Read review of University Tycoon - The College Management Simulator
A voxel-art city builder that trades money and disasters for a strict web of building adjacency rules, turning city planning into a genuine spatial puzzle — Very Positive on Steam, with a persistent, well-documented complaint that its achievement-gated progression can trap players on the first map for good.
7.2 / 10
Nine years, a fired writer, a dropped studio and one troubled development later, Bloodlines 2 shipped as an action-adventure closer to Dishonored than an RPG — and its own most-upvoted review, at over 10,000 votes, says the original team "deserved better than this."
5 / 10
A cheap, chapter-based choose-your-own-adventure through an alternate 1888 British Empire from a developer better known for jigsaw puzzles — genuinely witty in places, undercut by a missing save system and a colonial-frontier premise played disappointingly straight.
5.5 / 10
A hand-drawn point-and-click comedy about a laid-off boar's quest to become Emperor of an alternate-history Austria-Hungary — genuinely funny and gorgeous to look at, undone for a vocal minority by one hated minigame and a grindy achievement list.
7 / 10
A twin-stick shooter welded to an idle tycoon, told through a space-capitalism gag that outlasts most of the systems built to support it.
6.3 / 10
A widely loved Left 4 Dead-style co-op action RPG whose own longtime fans describe a recurring pattern of the developer breaking what worked — most seriously with a kernel-level anti-cheat system reviewers say has issued false-positive bans in a purely cooperative game.
7 / 10
A card-based Cultist Simulator-inspired alchemy sim that genre fans on both sides of the aggregate respect, undercut by a real mid-game grind wall, real save-corruption bugs, and offset by unusually active, near-weekly developer patching since launch.
6.5 / 10
A free 2018 AdVenture Capitalist-style clicker dressed up in cowboy hats, with a genuinely playable free loop, a reset curve that stretches from minutes to days, and an achievement list that expects you to recruit 80-plus strangers to friend you.
5.5 / 10
A faithful, historically significant remake of the 1981 game that founded the dungeon-crawler RPG genre — undermined by character-corrupting bugs its developer stopped patching over two years ago.
5.5 / 10
Read review of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord
Talentless Person Games' pocket-sized clicker sends you smashing other planets apart to rebuild the home you lost, over a LoFi soundtrack and a run that's done in about an hour. It's a pleasant enough hour for the asking price, but "survival" in the title oversells a game with no hunger, health or threat system anywhere in it.
5.5 / 10
A cheap, streamlined tactics spinoff that's held up reasonably well on its own mechanical terms for six years — until a company-wide Take-Two/2K Terms of Service change in 2025 dragged its recent review sentiment down over data collection and modding restrictions that have nothing to do with the game itself.
6 / 10
A sequel to the cult favourite Demon's Tilt that hands the ball a gun. The turret system, a nine-perk build layer and a three-story derelict-ship table make this one of the most inventive pinball games in years — provided your eyes can keep up with it.
8.4 / 10
A free 3D hero-collector idle RPG that has quietly run six years and 160-plus servers on Steam, better known among its own reviewers for a Steam tag list — Nudity, Sexual Content, Hentai — that the actual client does not deliver on than for anything it does in combat.
6 / 10
An idle guild-manager that has sat labelled "Early Access" on Steam since January 2017 with no update since that September — still installable, still free, and still collecting reviews from players logging hundreds of hours in a game its own developer stopped touching almost nine years ago.
4 / 10
A fourteen-year-old browser superhero RPG still running seasonal events every month in 2026 — beloved across most of Europe, and consistently rated Mixed by the English-speaking players who review it on Steam.
6 / 10
A polished AdVenture Capitalist-style idle tycoon that still earns steady thumbs-ups eight years on, even though its developer stopped visibly supporting it in 2019.
6.5 / 10
A competent, aggressively monetised gacha idle RPG that ran for almost four years — until the developer shut its servers down for good on 31 July 2025 and deleted every account. It can no longer be bought, downloaded or played.
4 / 10
A five-dollar space idler about mining, salvaging and shooting your way across eight planets — polished, fair-priced and almost entirely spent by the time the credits should be rolling.
6 / 10
PlayFlock's free asylum-horror clicker still has real atmosphere and a genuinely distinct art direction, but its own player base has spent a decade reporting the exact same progression wall around level 2000, and nobody at the studio has touched it since 2020.
5 / 10
A one-mechanic dragon-hunting action RPG — hold a direction, auto-fight, buy four stats — that most players clear in well under an hour, with an eleven-year-old windowed-mode bug still being reported the week before this review was written.
5.5 / 10
A 2019 semi-idle party RPG that most of its audience genuinely likes — except the small, verifiable slice of English-speaking buyers who kept hitting the same unresolved one-minute crash bug for five straight years, on a game whose developer stopped posting updates in 2021.
6.5 / 10
A free-to-play shop-management RPG that ran on Steam for six years, was Mostly Positive the whole time, and then simply stopped existing — servers shut down in 2022, delisted from sale, quietly replaced by a mobile sequel. There is no version of this game you can buy or play today.
3 / 10
VaragtP's puppet-theatre clicker arrived on Steam three weeks after Clicker Heroes and never quite escaped its shadow, but a decade of quiet patching, an honest NZ$4.49 price and zero microtransactions still make it worth a look — provided you don't mind that several of its 50 achievements want you to leave it running for a hundred hours or more.
6 / 10
