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.
The 2011 browser game that helped drag tower defense out of the Flash-portal era and into a genre of its own, still sitting at 96% positive on Steam a decade after its 2014 Unity port — mostly because the core loop of towers, heroes and boss fights it invented is still the one every entry since, including Ironhide's own sequels, gets measured against.
8.5 / 10
A solo-developer dungeon crawler where a small green-hooded adventurer works through expanding stone chambers on stamina, hearts and a growing key ring, with almost nobody outside the developer having weighed in on it yet.
5.5 / 10
A solo-developer, first-person turn-based deckbuilding roguelike that launched into Early Access on 6 August 2026 with three classes, over 100 relics and a ten-tier ascension ladder already in place — reviewed the following day, with zero user reviews yet to check the pitch against and achievement stats that resolve to roughly two reporting accounts.
6.5 / 10
A NZ$7.39 solo-built idle hack-and-slash whose loot ladder hollows out around the mythical and divine tiers — verified by the developer's own promotional screenshot of a veteran save file — and whose lead developer announced in January 2026 that the game will never be updated again.
6 / 10
An incremental heist game that flips the loot-RPG premise on its head — heroes clear the dungeons and find the treasure, and you play the goblin who steals it back from them while they're still inside.
7 / 10
A NZ$7.39 first-person forest-chopping incremental from Inner Realm Studios and Dumb Duck Games — 680 Steam reviews at 82.5% positive, checked against a full pull of every English negative review and the game's own achievement-completion curve, both of which land on the same structural complaint: a strong first two hours, then a wall.
6.5 / 10
A one-day-old Japanese horror walking sim whose entire hook is a gaze-driven fog of war — the neighbourhood only exists where you're actually looking, and looking is also how the thing hunting you finds you. Reviewed on launch day, against zero Steam reviews and the developer's own two-title track record.
7 / 10
An aggregator filed this NZ$1.49 release as a Clicker; it is a 50-question Russian internet-meme trivia quiz with AI-recreated images, no sound, a fixed question order that guts its own replay value, and a review corpus that is 86% Russian-language.
4.3 / 10
A desktop-overlay idle aquarium that genuinely earns its Idler tag and out-designs its rivals on tank capacity and how literally it sits on your desktop, but a fifteen-month-old review corpus this thin, two serious memory-leak reports and thirteen months of developer silence keep it from matching the library's better-supported pond games.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed idle mining clicker that left seven months of Early Access on 6 August 2026 with a genuinely novel twist — spending points to weight the odds of its own random events — but arrived with a three-review corpus already reporting broken pet slots, a muted-sound bug, and a gem shop that won't take money.
6.5 / 10
A loop-based analog-horror game where you replay the same corridor hunting for what changed, told through VHS static and a flashlight that keeps something in the dark at bay — released two days ago to exactly two user reviews, split one positive and one negative.
6 / 10
A three-day-old Early Access idle RPG that runs thirteen separate skill trackers off one RuneScape-flavoured template, lets you train two of them at once, and caps its offline catch-up at a clearly documented 24 hours — for a one-time NZ$4.31 with no reviews, no achievements curve worth reading, and a developer FAQ that admits the balance still needs work.
7 / 10
A solo-developed first-person open-world RPG that regenerates a 250 km² province every campaign and wraps combat, crafting, family upkeep, crime and slavery-and-abolition systems around one shared skill ladder — launched into Early Access with an 18-to-24-month roadmap to 1.0 and its main storyline not yet in the build.
6.5 / 10
A NZ$13.25 picross-minesweeper hybrid built around one continuous 60,000-tile puzzle split into 200-plus regions, where over half of owners fight all the way through to full completion — undercut by three of the game's only eleven English negatives independently accusing its Egyptology trivia of being undisclosed AI text.
7.2 / 10
A desktop pet, not a game in any conventional sense — Wukong or Amei sit on your screen, react to your typing and clicking, and let you draw their outfits by hand. Reviewed two days after launch, with almost no review corpus yet to judge it by.
6 / 10
A third-person sci-fi horde shooter that pairs Vampire Survivors-scale enemy counts with build-your-own ARPG crafting, launched into Early Access with a specific roadmap, an honest price and zero independent track record to check any of it against.
6 / 10
A 3-6 player multiplayer parkour game that pairs precision platforming with a build-your-loadout ability deck and a level-based unlock ladder, launched with a single Russian-language user review and zero people playing it at the moment this was checked.
5.5 / 10
A story-driven sci-fi Memory-game adventure — flip cards to find matching pairs, battle enemies and stranded astronauts with them — filed under "Massively Multiplayer" on Steam despite a single-player campaign, a PvP mode still labelled Beta on its own store page, zero user reviews and zero concurrent players at the time this was checked.
4.5 / 10
A live-action interactive drama about a double-agent infiltrating a collaborationist spy agency in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1939, built on genuine branching and a day-cycle resource system, undercut by a narrative its own dedicated audience says leans far harder into romance than the espionage thriller it was sold as.
6.5 / 10
A budget one-on-one arena brawler that leans hard into a "classic 90s fighting" pitch, published by a company built on reviving old and obscure game libraries, on a Steam page with no user reviews, no press coverage and no achievement data yet to check it against.
6 / 10
A memory-match card grid wrapped around a genuine dungeon-crawling RPG — flip pairs to fight monsters, loot treasure and trigger traps, then take what survives back to a Guild hub to level a deck capped at eleven cards.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed turn-based roguelite where a single squire fights nine battles in a row per arena with no rest between them, so the wound you're carrying into fight seven matters as much as the one you took in fight one.
7 / 10
A first-person prison survival sim that launched into Early Access on 5 August 2026 with a broken opening objective — every one of its first user reviews describes the morning roll call softlocking progress, and a hotfix the next day only partly closed the gap between the pitch and the build.
3.5 / 10
A one-day-old pixel RPG about a teenager who discovers psychic powers in a sleepy mountain town and enters a boss-only tournament with no map marker to guide him — a tight, five-dollar story built to finish in an afternoon, with zero Steam reviews yet to test the pitch.
6.5 / 10
