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 cozy incremental fishing spin-off from the Fish to Dish studio, where charm and a fair price win over most players despite a confirmed use of generative AI art that upset a vocal minority, and a specific, repeatedly confirmed design flaw — the game's essential convenience features stay locked away until right before the credits roll.
6 / 10
A NZ$7.19 fishing idler that lives along the bottom of your screen, updated relentlessly for a year — and whose 26 English critics mostly object that an idle game shouldn't need watching.
7.5 / 10
Five years of development, a new engine, a genuinely brilliant tactical system — and an interface that its own 25,000-hour veterans call a nightmare, on a game that shipped missing features it had a decade ago.
5.5 / 10
A Pomodoro-technique productivity companion disguised as an idle weapon-forging desktop pet — finish a focus session, a blacksmith maiden finishes a weapon, and you both work toward her freedom — loved so far by an almost entirely Chinese-speaking early audience.
7.5 / 10
Quite possibly the best arcade racer ever made, set in the best map the series has built — and its two most-upvoted negative reviews are from people who couldn't play it because they block telemetry.
7.5 / 10
An active clicker where pickaxes are forbidden and bombs do all the digging, chaining explosive ore reactions across a cute 8x8 pixel mine — well liked by a genuinely international audience, with two specific complaints, an achievement bug and a rough endgame mode, showing up independently across different languages.
6.5 / 10
1.25 million reviews, twenty years old, still patched in 2026 — and its negative column is a museum of arguments from 2013 to 2015, while the one live complaint isn't about the game at all.
8.5 / 10
An idle incremental RPG wrapped around a genuinely creepy generational-horror premise — die, pass your DNA to the next generation, grow stronger, discover who's really benefiting — undercut by a specific, well-corroborated complaint from two independent reviewers that the core power fantasy runs backwards.
5.5 / 10
A conventional open-world checklist game wearing the most beautiful presentation layer in the genre — and, after Sony's reported retreat from PC in March 2026, quite possibly the last Sucker Punch game PC players get to buy.
8.5 / 10
A deliberately frozen 2024-era build of Combat Waffle Studios' own VR extraction shooter, sold as a separate paid product to players who wanted a beloved removed map back in the live game — a genuinely unusual business decision that a large share of its own buyers resent even while enjoying what it delivers.
5.5 / 10
A near-universally acclaimed reinvention of the series into a slower, more personal Norse epic — praised almost unanimously, with an honest, considered minority of longtime original-series fans who miss the classic combat, and a real, recurring Steam Deck "Verified" labeling problem tied to a documented memory leak.
9 / 10
A widely acclaimed single-player crime saga bundled with an online mode whose 2017-2018 wrongful-ban epidemic became one of the most documented anti-cheat fairness disputes on Steam — improved since, but echoed by a related complaint that persists into 2024-2025.
7.5 / 10
Klei Entertainment's deck-building roguelite wraps card combat and card-based negotiation around real narrative choice — praised widely for its writing and world, while a consistent, thoughtful minority argue the cards underneath don't hold up to the genre's best.
7 / 10
A dark fantasy skilling idle RPG that layers roaming named bosses and a weekly rhythm of world-changing "Blessings" on top of a structure several of its own reviewers, across four languages, independently call a close read of Melvor Idle — right down to the 99 skill cap.
6.5 / 10
A brutally tense, atmospheric co-op horror shooter built entirely around four-player coordination — undercut for years by the one thing it never properly solved: no server browser or real matchmaking, leaving solo players locked out unless they already have a premade squad.
6.5 / 10
A guild-management idle RPG with FF12-style Tactics scripting and concurrent party automation, whose launch performance crisis was corroborated by players across four language communities — and whose developer's rapid, well-documented patching earned real goodwill from many of the same players who first reported it.
6.5 / 10
A free roguelike RPG port of a long-running mobile game — with the microtransactions stripped out, a year of updates its own reviewers said would never come, and only 49 English reviews to judge it by.
7 / 10
A hand-drawn boss-rush action game whose bosses grow stronger based on the order you fight them — reviewed against a 239-review corpus, an achievement curve that confirms just how brutal the ending really is, and a single dominant complaint that crosses five languages.
7.5 / 10
Supergiant's first-ever sequel splits its roguelite loop into two directions instead of one, hands Melinoë a mana bar to manage on top of her dash, and asks you to keep three separate meta-progression tracks fed at once — an ambitious redesign that mostly earns its scope. It also shipped a 1.0 ending that triggered a real backlash, one Supergiant is still visibly patching a response to nine months later.
8.5 / 10
Still the best case anyone has made for virtual reality, six years on — 98.3% positive, and the loudest criticism on its store page is a launch-day review that says "in its current state".
9 / 10
A gorgeously styled action roguelike casting you as an overworked Death cleaning house on a rogue corporate afterlife, whose Early Access growing pains have mostly faded — leaving a more current, specific complaint about late-game difficulty spikes and level variety in their place.
7 / 10
A solo developer's early-2000s-styled horror PvP and co-op shooter, framed as a cursed childhood game whose servers mysteriously reopened — reviewed on a complete, entirely positive 25-review sample spanning English and a notably large Spanish-speaking fanbase.
8 / 10
A dark-fantasy dungeon crawler that spent 2022 as an underappreciated curiosity and 2025 as a giveaway ahead of its sequel — and the two waves of reviews it produced tell almost opposite stories about the same game.
6.5 / 10
The 2017 original that the whole modern metroidvania wave points back to. Nine years on it still sells on reputation alone — and the reputation holds up, with one honest asterisk.
9 / 10
