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 voxel zombie survival game built entirely around a scheduled siege that arrives on a known clock and gets worse every time. Eleven years in Early Access ended in July 2024 — the core loop is still one of the smartest in the genre, but the years show in how it looks, runs and argues with its own community about what it used to be.
7.5 / 10
A solo-developed guild management idle RPG with eleven classes, eleven tiered professions and hour-long raids, sold once for NZ$7.39 with no ads and nothing else to buy — an ambitious system let down at launch by dungeons and raids that don't repeat on their own, which is a strange gap in a game built around leaving it alone.
6.5 / 10
The game that put "idle" in front of a whole generation of mobile RPGs is still being patched weekly seven years on, folded this year into a "Companions" relaunch that reunites its oldest servers — underneath the fresh coat of paint, its gacha economy is still one of the harsher ones in the genre it helped invent.
6 / 10
A colony sim that turns its whole progression system into a programming lesson — you don't unlock better robots, you unlock better scripts, and the game lives or dies on whether that scripting language can keep up with the colony you build with it.
7.5 / 10
Backpack Hero turns the inventory screen itself into the entire combat system — item shape, orientation and neighbouring slots decide what a fight looks like, not a separate stats page. A look at whether that idea, and the game built around it, survived the jump from a free browser prototype to a finished commercial release the developer has since gone quiet on.
7.5 / 10
An action-combat MMO where the fighting is closer to a character-action game than a tab-target RPG, the real long-term game is an offline worker economy running nodes and trade routes while you're logged out, and gear upgrades can fail hard enough to destroy the item you spent months building. Ten years old, still getting weekly content, and still the most mechanically dense MMO most players will ever half-understand.
7.5 / 10
A one-time-purchase idle RPG that borrows every visual and structural trick of gacha hero collectors — six rarities, duplicate fusion, a 70-champion banner — and then declines to sell any of it, which makes it one of the more interesting monetisation experiments the genre has produced this year.
6.5 / 10
A two-person Swedish studio's pixel-art ARPG stacks skill trees, runes, sockets and artifacts into a genuinely deep build sandbox for the price of a takeaway meal — but the achievement data shows most players never see the endgame that's supposed to justify it.
7 / 10
An action RPG about playing an MMO, built around one verb — throwing an energy ball that ricochets off walls — that does double duty as the combat system and the language every dungeon puzzle is written in.
8.5 / 10
A first-person fantasy dungeon crawler where every raid ends one of two ways — you walk out through a portal with everything you found, or you die and hand it all to whoever killed you. Two years into Early Access on Steam, the extraction loop is still the sharpest thing about it, and the studio's legal history is still not fully behind it.
7 / 10
A NZ$5.11 incremental about optimising messy hard drives, whose Mixed Steam rating splits cleanly along a timeline rather than a taste — a rocky launch day the developer patched fast, and a slower, still-unresolved design gate that keeps a chunk of players stuck clicking long before the game lets them stop.
6.5 / 10
A factory-and-colony sim where the automation isn't belts or menus of orders but a real node-based programming language you wire up yourself, one behavior graph per unit. The most technically ambitious game in its genre, and honest proof of how much that ambition costs at the door.
7 / 10
A free browser incremental about a single dragon that eventually consumes the entire numeral system, built solo (with two collaborators) by Demonin and finished — deliberately — in 2024, with no further updates planned.
7.5 / 10
The Definitive Edition of Dragon Quest XI doesn't reinvent the turn-based JRPG, and that's the point — an orchestral score, a full second 2D presentation of the same 100-hour campaign, and combat that trusts the format instead of subverting it.
8.5 / 10
Read review of Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age — Definitive Edition
A menu-only farming MMO that has quietly run since 2021 with no ads and a genuinely optional shop, propped up by a community wiki so thorough that half the game's actual strategy lives outside the app.
7 / 10
Square Enix rebuilt Final Fantasy as a single-character action game with a Devil May Cry pedigree and the most ambitious set pieces the genre has ever staged, then paid for it with the party control, gear depth and build variety that used to define the series.
7.5 / 10
A NZ$2.69 boat-and-auction idle tycoon whose "Mixed" Steam rating is mostly a fossil record of its 17-month Early Access run — and whose core complaint, that the whole game empties out inside two hours with nothing built to replace it, still checks out against the game's own achievement data today.
4.5 / 10
Cygames' stand-alone action RPG wraps a four-player hunting-game loop inside a JRPG's full production budget, and the combat mostly earns the spectacle around it. This is not the mobile gacha that shares its name — it's a single upfront purchase with no pulls and no premium currency — but its sigil-driven, Proud Quest endgame asks more patience than it repays.
7.5 / 10
Obsidian shrinks you to the size of an ant and lets that single premise reshape exploration, combat and crafting all at once. Nearly four years after 1.0, the backyard is still one of the smartest survival maps in the genre — even as Obsidian's attention has visibly moved on to the sequel.
8 / 10
The mobile half of a decade-old hero-collector empire, reviewed under the name it actually ships with today — a competent auto-battler with a genuinely flexible manual/auto combat switch, buried under the industry's most notorious ad campaign and a monetisation stack that never really lets up.
5.5 / 10
Kolibri Games takes the miner-elevator-warehouse template it invented in 2016 and reskins it as a bank, with Marketing, Service Windows, Vault and Main Hall standing in for the usual dig-lift-sell chain. The loop still works; the shop around it leans harder on ads and loot boxes than the studio's older, better-loved games.
5.5 / 10
A free browser incremental where you grow a zombie horde one infected townsperson at a time, with genuinely deep golem, skeleton and rune systems sitting on top of the usual spawn-and-wait loop — held back by a punishing late-game grind and a developer who stopped updating it in 2021.
6.5 / 10
A long-running idle RPG about a monster-forest slime clan grinding gear and dungeons, still pulling ten million-plus downloads years after launch — undercut lately by an ad frequency its own players say has quietly gotten much worse.
5.5 / 10
Twenty-two years before "life-skill game" became a genre, Mabinogi built one — a rank-based skill system and an ageing/rebirth loop that still let a character who never fights become a genuinely finished build, currently mid-transplant into a new Unreal Engine 5 body.
7.5 / 10
