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.
An ambitious, magic-only Soulslike built almost entirely by one developer, drawing genuine Dark Souls and Elden Ring comparisons for its interconnected world and spellcrafting, undercut by missing hit feedback, unrebindable controls and a scarcity of post-launch fixes for problems its own fans have been asking about since release.
5.5 / 10
A post-apocalyptic colony-survival shooter whose Early Access launch drew one of the most lopsided negative receptions this library has documented — and a same-day developer admission, unusually honest for how bad the reviews were, that quick fixes won't be enough.
3 / 10
A WWII RTS that launched to a genuinely damning "sold as finished, played like early access" verdict from its own franchise veterans, still defended passionately by players with literally thousands of hours logged — and still, three years on, carrying one specific, unaddressed complaint both camps agree on.
6 / 10
A gorgeous, hand-drawn metroidvania about a paintbrush-wielding artist escaping a decaying inner world built from her declining mental health — whose art, music and premise draw near-universal praise, sitting alongside a majority-of-negative-sample complaint about spongy, repetitive boss fights and platforming precision the movement itself doesn't reliably support.
6.5 / 10
A visually spectacular sequel to a beloved mobile-turned-PC crafting RPG that Butterscotch Shenanigans has supported with an unusually relentless year of updates, held back at launch by mobile-first controls and a text-heavy script that its own most detailed critics — many of them the original's biggest fans — argue buried the sequel's real improvements.
8 / 10
A genuinely inventive golf-precision-platformer whose own most enthusiastic players keep arriving at the same specific verdict — the game is excellent, and the roguelite structure wrapped around it is a mismatch that makes hours-long runs punishing rather than replayable.
6.5 / 10
A genuinely ambitious cyberpunk tactics RPG blending XCOM-style squad combat with Shadowrun-flavoured heist design, whose exceptionally hands-on developer earns some of the warmest praise this outlet has documented all year — sitting alongside a real, concentrated complaint from its highest-voted reviewers that its June 2025 "1.0" release still reads like Early Access in disguise.
7.5 / 10
A Souls-like dark fantasy action RPG whose stamina-based combat and boss design draw strong, specific praise, built around a punishing blessing-and-curse death penalty system that the same review base credits as harsh-but-fair and condemns as arbitrarily unfair almost in equal measure.
6.5 / 10
The first and, still, only video game built on Pathfinder Second Edition's actual rules, praised near-unanimously by tabletop fans for its combat fidelity and let down mainly by a short base campaign gated behind paid story DLC and writing that can't match its mechanical accuracy.
8 / 10
A polished turn-based zombie survival tactics game that faithfully adapts the brutal, high-RNG ruleset of the Zombicide board game, drawing a wave of frustrated reviews from players who expected XCOM-style fairness instead of Zombicide's deliberately punishing chaos.
6.5 / 10
A style-obsessed hack-and-slash action RPG from the creator of the cult favourite Lucah, earning near-unanimous acclaim for its combat design and unmistakable queer, gothic identity, with its only real friction coming from fans of its predecessor debating how much of that game's raw emotional edge survived the transition.
8.5 / 10
NIS turns its flagship turn-based tactical RPG series into real-time action combat for the first time, and the series' own longtime fans are split down the middle — the humour and grind-loop identity survived the transition, but a four-to-five-hour campaign at full price and a single playable protagonist have drawn sustained criticism even from people who like it.
5.5 / 10
A charming, dice-driven roguelike deckbuilder from solo developer Heckmouse whose fans and critics are arguing over exactly the question this outlet has learned to ask of every randomised builder — does the player get real tools to fight bad luck, or does the game just stay random — with both sides making their case in detail rather than talking past each other.
7.5 / 10
A Motherload-inspired mining roguelite whose tense dig-and-defend loop earns some of the most specific sound-design praise in this library, held back at launch by a "too little content" complaint that dominated its negative reviews for years before free multiplayer and a first paid expansion finally answered it.
7.5 / 10
One of the most acclaimed shooters of its generation, still Overwhelmingly Positive a decade on with recent sentiment running even stronger than its already-elite lifetime score — its few substantive complaints are a matter of taste (some find the campaign repetitive) and a largely historical, patched save-wiping bug from launch week, not anything currently live.
9 / 10
A visually spectacular, mechanically excellent shooter that reshaped its predecessor's combat into a more demanding resource-management loop some veterans call a chore rather than an improvement — and whose negative sample still carries two well-documented controversies years later: a 2020 kernel-level anti-cheat scandal (since removed) and an ongoing protest over id Software's treatment of composer Mick Gordon.
8.5 / 10
A gorgeously painted, nostalgic coming-of-age story whose watercolour art draws near-universal praise, undercut by a consistent and specific complaint — echoed even by its fans — that the interactivity underneath is shallow, clunky and short enough that many players never see it through.
6.5 / 10
A gorgeous hexagonal tile-placement puzzle that its own devoted players can't agree is actually relaxing — some call it genuine anxiety relief, others a hardcore puzzle in a cozy disguise — with a lack of tools to recover from bad luck as the most consistent complaint, and a smaller but genuine controversy over the developer promoting their next game inside it.
7.5 / 10
A genre-defining, universally beloved CRPG whose Steam version has become genuinely unreliable on modern hardware — three-quarters of this review's negative sample cite crashes, the complaint has worsened every year since 2023 rather than fading, and 16 of 100 negative reviewers independently recommend buying the DRM-free GOG version instead.
6.5 / 10
A cheap solo-developer idle RPG whose launch week produced one of the more one-sided review corpora in this library — a near-unanimous complaint about a bewildering interface, compounded by repeated, independently corroborated reports of the developer deleting critical reviews and banning players who asked for help.
3.5 / 10
A fishing-and-exploration horror hybrid that reviewers rate Overwhelmingly Positive and keep recommending anyway, even while its single loudest, most consistent critique — a spectacular opening that the game never quite develops — shows up inside a striking share of its own five-star reviews.
8 / 10
A genuinely inventive Tetris-meets-deckbuilding roguelike whose meta-progression system fits, almost too neatly, the exact design trap this outlet has flagged before in randomised builders — more unlocked content without more ways to steer around it, making runs feel less focused rather than richer the longer a player sticks with it.
7.5 / 10
A free-to-play action RPG that launched with a genuinely rare promise — no gacha for characters or weapons — and won real goodwill for it, before its own launcher distributed actual credential-stealing malware to players twice in the space of a month.
6 / 10
A likeable single-character autobattler roguelike with a genuine "minmax and watch the number go up" dopamine loop, whose solo developer stopped patching within a month of release and, according to multiple reviewers, said outright that they no longer enjoyed working on the game.
5 / 10
