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 free PSX-style survival horror game set in a deep-sea prison where cutting off a monster's limb makes it multiply — reviewed on its complete 16-review sample, which splits cleanly between reviewers charmed by its atmosphere and reviewers who call it an unfinished alpha.
6 / 10
A gorgeous, enormous free wuxia open world with some of the most charming systems design in any live-service RPG — welded to an energy meter, five battle passes and a cosmetic gacha that its own store page describes as cosmetics-only.
7.5 / 10
A cheap, dark-comedy skeleton-army incremental with real charm in its premise and a six-review sample split almost exactly down the middle — including two reviews that make directly opposite, specific technical claims about the same systems.
5 / 10
A procedural storytelling tactical RPG that follows the same handful of heroes from their first pitchfork fight to old age, generating genuinely moving personal arcs — until enough playthroughs reveal the same event templates repeating underneath the charm.
8 / 10
A gorgeously presented card-battler roguelike whose steep, deliberately punishing difficulty split its launch reception sharply — genre veterans defending it as fairly hard rather than broken, newer players describing runs so polarized that skill barely seems to matter.
7.5 / 10
One of the best-feeling shooters on the market, wired into a progression system that several of its own designers appear to have disagreed about — and, after two years in Early Access, finally close to 1.0.
7.5 / 10
A free, solo-developed idle RPG on its 161st update after seven years — with a monetisation model its biggest spenders defend, and a review calling it abandoned that the patch notes flatly disprove.
7.5 / 10
An alien-planet survival and building sandbox — described by one of its own players as "stitched from Don't Starve, Terraria, Stardew Valley and RimWorld" — that launched into Early Access with a punishing hunger system and has spent thirteen straight days of near-daily patches turning early frustration into a genuinely glowing recent reception.
7.5 / 10
A free-to-play idle strategy MMO about building an egg-themed civilization, split almost exactly down the middle between players who find real layered depth in its economy and combat systems, and players frustrated by a slow start, progress-halting bugs, and lingering distrust of the developer's previous game.
5.5 / 10
A veteran-defined tank warfare MMO whose Steam launch stumbled over locked-out existing accounts in 2021, and whose long, escalating pay-to-win reputation reached a documented breaking point in May 2025 when Wargaming introduced tiered loot boxes that sent its most invested ten-year players heading for the exit.
5 / 10
A handsome late-Ming soulslike carrying a Mixed badge that English-speaking players didn't give it — and a post-launch patch that changed the story out from under the people who'd finished it.
7.5 / 10
The most completely simulated economy in games, eight years of free updates, and one recurring problem — in a game about giving orders to AI, the AI is what 61 of its hundred negative reviews complain about.
7.5 / 10
A dad taught himself to code so his 8-year-old son could have a game where he "finds cool swords and fights monsters forever" — a genuinely sweet origin story wrapped around a standard-issue idle RPG that its own early players are split on once the swords run out.
6.5 / 10
A co-op survival crafting game that traps scientists inside a Half-Life-flavoured secret research facility after a containment breach, Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 41,000 Steam reviews for its inventive setting and crafting depth — with a remarkably consistent, still-current complaint that its final act and late-game content don't live up to everything that came before.
8 / 10
A solo developer in Edinburgh shipped a complete, story-driven survival-crafting game straight to 1.0 with no Early Access period — a genuine feat that's earned near-universal respect, complicated only by a real and recurring complaint that the store page sells it as something more open-ended than the tightly linear campaign it actually is.
7.5 / 10
A solo-developed, short, deliberately silly incremental about worshipping a mysterious orb and recruiting cultists to do the clicking for you — charming enough to earn 95% positive reviews, and refreshingly willing to end rather than pad itself out with an unnecessary prestige loop.
7.5 / 10
Ubisoft Blue Byte's Industrial Revolution city-builder remains Very Positive across more than 32,000 Steam reviews, widely regarded as one of the genre's most visually accomplished and addictive entries — undercut by a real, remarkably severe and still-current complaint about Ubisoft Connect, the mandatory third-party launcher that multiple independent reviewers describe locking them out of a game they purchased entirely, in incidents dated as recently as June 2026.
6.5 / 10
Campaign for votes by day, fight the incumbent's gangs by night, and steal each boss's supernatural power when you beat them. A genuinely novel roguelike from the Anomaly Agent studio — one day old, visibly unfinished, and carrying a 97% score that needs reading carefully.
7 / 10
Ubisoft rebuilt Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag from the ground up on the current Anvil engine rather than simply upscaling it, and the parts that made the 2013 original a fan favourite — Edward Kenway, the Jackdaw, the whole rotten, beautiful Caribbean — survive the trip largely intact. What doesn't survive as cleanly is some of the combat identity Ubisoft chose to strip out along the way.
7.5 / 10
The most beautiful open world Ubisoft has built, and the clearest case study in gaming of a cash shop reaching backwards into a game's design. Eight years on it costs NZ$19.99 and holds 89% — but the level gates it built around its XP boosters are still exactly where they were.
7.5 / 10
Ubisoft's feudal Japan entry delivers genuinely beautiful visuals and a widely loved shinobi protagonist, undercut by a real, consistently repeated "formula fatigue" complaint — towers, icons, repetition — a verified gap between Ubisoft's public promise of full offline play and what reviewers report experiencing in practice, and a heavily monetised in-game store layered on top of a full NZ$109.95 purchase.
6.5 / 10
Hazelight Studios' prison-break co-op predecessor to It Takes Two and Split Fiction remains Very Positive across more than 102,000 Steam reviews for its inventive, purely two-player design — but this review can confirm a real, still-current complaint It Takes Two eventually resolved: A Way Out's mandatory EA App launcher continues to cause connection failures, crashes and Steam-invite friction in reviews dated as recently as August 2025, with no fix announcement found anywhere in the developer's own Steam communications.
6.5 / 10
A brick-breaker, base-builder and roguelite mashed together into something genuinely novel — and, by a large and coherent share of its own fans, something that runs out of ideas within its first ten hours and never quite finds a reason to justify the dozens more it invites.
8 / 10
You hire desperate men, name them, watch them die, and hire more. Nine years on it's still the best mercenary-company RPG ever made — and still arguing with its own players about whether a 75% hit chance that misses four times running is good design.
8 / 10
