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 dark-fantasy extraction ARPG with genuinely good third-person combat, undercut at launch by a "solo or trio" pitch that turns out to mean trio, missing regional servers, and a cash shop players keep calling scummy in the same reviews that praise the fighting.
6 / 10
A genuinely inventive fusion of Metroidvania exploration and Pokémon-style monster taming with real tactical depth, undercut for a large share of its own fans by a late-game boss-scaling system that turns an excellent first twenty hours into a grind many never finish.
7 / 10
A charming, Ghibli-inspired post-apocalyptic crafting and farming life-sim that's built a genuinely devoted, cross-generational fanbase over six years — while a long, consistent thread of its own reviews keeps arguing the developers never quite finished fixing it.
7 / 10
A free, PS1-textured love letter to World at War and Black Ops 1's original Zombies mode, built by a small team that shipped ten hotfixes in its first five days — including one that directly fixed the exact balance complaint players were posting about at the same time.
8 / 10
A genuinely excellent basketball simulator wrapped in an economy where one season's pass costs more than the whole discounted game — and where the sequel went on pre-order while those passes were still being sold.
6 / 10
A genuine landmark action RPG whose Steam version spent four years as a warning label of its own — a beloved, philosophically ambitious game shipped in a technically broken PC port that Square Enix quietly fixed on a different storefront first.
8.5 / 10
A hand-drawn Taopunk action-platformer that translates Sekiro's deflection combat into 2D with remarkable precision — and asks you to accept that parrying is the only real answer it has.
8.5 / 10
The most complete redemption story in gaming, a decade on. The 2016 launch reviews and the 2026 ones are describing almost different games — and the newest wave of criticism has nothing to do with the old one.
8 / 10
An XCOM-style Viking tactics RPG with genuinely praised writing that launched in a technical state its own reviewers compared to Early Access — and has spent the months since visibly recovering as negative-review volume collapsed following a string of patches.
6.5 / 10
A NZ$7.39 plinko roguelike about making numbers get bigger, 97.4% positive — and 56 of its 100 most-helpful negative reviews are about the same thing: you are not really in control.
7.5 / 10
A turn-based RPG that splits its time between a colourful dream world and a grounded, emotionally heavy reality, built around themes of grief and mental health with a level of care that's earned it one of the most devoted followings of any recent indie RPG.
9 / 10
A genuinely strange free survival MMO whose defining flaw — seasonal servers that wiped everything you built — has quietly been fixed, while its veterans have moved on to a different argument entirely.
7 / 10
A short, genuinely inventive puzzle adventure that reaches outside the game window to talk to you — 98.3% positive, and if you're on Linux or Steam Deck you should buy a different version of it.
8.5 / 10
A deeply weird, deeply charming farming and creature-collector hybrid that resolves disputes with dance battles instead of combat — arriving on Steam years late and still trailing a genuinely ugly 2019 controversy that has little to do with the game itself.
7.5 / 10
Build a machine that makes gold, then spend three hours making it smaller — 97.1% positive, nine years old, and still receiving patches a fortnight ago.
8.5 / 10
A free horror-fantasy visual novel about a messy, thirty-something friend group dragged back into the wish-granting wonderland of their childhood — remastered and re-released this July to a genuinely spotless review record.
8.5 / 10
A time-loop mystery about a tiny solar system that "everyone says" you need to experience knowing nothing about — Overwhelmingly Positive at 95.6%, and honest enough with itself that its own top negative review is a genuinely unresolved crowdfunding controversy, not a design flaw.
9 / 10
A satisfying first-island crafting loop that thins out badly afterwards — 93% positive lifetime, 80% across its last hundred reviews, and a free prologue that some players think is better designed than the paid game.
6.5 / 10
A beloved chaotic co-op cooking sequel whose biggest, most persistent complaint isn't about difficulty or design — it's a specific online-connectivity problem reviewers have reported in nearly every year since 2018, plus one infamous level that keeps coming up for genuine motion sickness.
7 / 10
A Mostly Negative badge on one of the best-designed shooters ever made — and the single most-upvoted criticism of it, at 21,456 votes, has been edited by its own author to say most of it no longer applies.
7 / 10
A haunting, atmospheric car-survival roguelike whose single biggest obstacle to a wider audience isn't its horror or its driving physics — it's a save system that a large, consistent share of reviewers say makes the game genuinely incompatible with an interrupted life.
7.5 / 10
A border-checkpoint bureaucracy simulator that turns document-checking into genuine drama, thirteen years on. Its creator says its themes have only become more relevant with time — a fact he finds less like vindication and more like a tragedy.
9 / 10
The indie life sim that spent seven years being the great Sims alternative, now 91% positive and a million copies sold — with a build mode people adore and a live mode its own supporters say isn't finished.
7 / 10
A dark-fantasy roguelike where you spend an hour designing a character and about eight minutes watching them win — 98% positive, and its critics and its store page agree on exactly what it is.
7.5 / 10
