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.
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
The original 2D side-scrolling MMORPG is still running twenty-three years after its Korean debut, still free to download, and still built around a gear-enhancement gamble severe enough that a Korean regulator fined its publisher for hiding how it worked.
6.5 / 10
Moonlighter splits itself between a dungeon-crawling roguelite and a shop-management sim, and the two halves are tied together by a genuinely clever idea — you set your own prices and read the customers to find out if you got it right. The question worth answering eight years on is whether that idea, and the combat around it, still hold up once the spreadsheet gets written.
7.5 / 10
Team Ninja builds a three-stance, Ki Pulse-driven combat system deeper than almost anything else in the genre, then buries a big chunk of its own goodwill under Diablo-scale loot noise and mission design that leans hard on reused level layouts.
8 / 10
Nolla Games' falling-sand roguelite simulates every pixel of fire, gas, liquid and rock as one honest physical system, then hands you a wand editor deep enough to break that system on purpose. Four and a half years after its 1.0 release, only one in ten owners has ever finished it.
9 / 10
The sequel that actually lets its eight travelers meet each other, wrapped around the same Break and Boost combat that made the original worth playing and a day/night toggle that changes what every town has to offer.
8.5 / 10
A NZ$7.99 mining incremental that puts a slot machine in the middle of its progression loop, then declines to say clearly what a bad spin actually costs you — a genuinely interesting hook, undercut by how little the game or its early reception have yet proven about it.
6.5 / 10
A one-developer idle RPG that hides a genuinely dense passive-perk tree and a town worth automating behind a rough Android build that still crashes for some players seven years after its first prototype.
5.5 / 10
The version of Persona 5 that's actually for sale everywhere now, and the one worth reviewing on its own mechanical terms — a turn-based JRPG whose real engine isn't the combat or the style, it's a calendar that turns every evening into a resource-allocation decision with consequences that outlast the day.
9 / 10
The 2020 game that started the shape-cutting automation genre, built by stripping Factorio down to logistics alone — no combat, no scarcity, no enemies. Cheap, historically important, and rougher than the sequel it spawned.
7.5 / 10
A city builder that abandons the colonist as its unit of decision and manages a population instead — tens of thousands of citizens, an empire beyond the walls, and an interface that makes you earn every bit of that scale.
7.5 / 10
Eight fully voice-acted BioWare RPGs wearing an MMO's clothing, fifteen years on and still the best argument for that structure the genre has ever produced. Reviewed with Update 7.9 "Legacy Reborn" current and 8.0 on the public test server.
7.5 / 10
A NZ$10.29 fusion of time-loop adventure and idle incremental that has held a Very Positive Steam rating across four and a half years — not by avoiding friction, but by turning the loop's reset into the exact mechanism that makes idle progression permanent, while never fixing the one interface complaint players have repeated since launch week.
7 / 10
An open-world survival game that strips out weapons almost entirely and replaces them with an oxygen gauge, a sound cue you can't place, and a lot of very dark water. Eight years after full release, it's still the best argument that dread works better than a sword.
9 / 10
A free auto-battler RPG that runs as a tiny window pinned to your taskbar, built on a six-class roster and a stack-nine-to-rank-up loot system — undercut by a storefront that sells two more classes and the extra bag space its own item design is engineered to demand.
6 / 10
A factory-automation game that puts the camera underground and gives you a gun that deletes stone, so verticality and terrain destruction do real design work instead of being a setting. The idea is stronger than the execution — a convoluted tech tree, a frame rate that sags under a big base, and a developer that's gone quiet since the 1.0 launch hold it back.
6.5 / 10
A free browser idle-RPG about running a wizard's lair that quietly became one of the genre's most influential designs, then got left behind by its own creator and kept alive since by a scattered handful of fans.
7 / 10
A city builder where the antagonist isn't a raid or a monster roster but a drought timer, and every dam, canal and reservoir you build is really an answer to a scheduling problem. Beavers are the theme; water is the game.
8 / 10
The 2006 Diablo alternative that swapped gothic horror for Greek, Egyptian and Asian mythology, revisited twenty years on through the Anniversary Edition that's now the only way to buy it.
7.5 / 10
A voxel-building MMO welded to an ARPG loot treadmill, still running eleven years after Trion Worlds made it and three community letters a month after gamigo took over. The question in 2026 isn't whether Trove survives — it clearly does — it's how much of it is still a game and how much is a storefront.
6 / 10
A voxel survival sandbox that replaces Minecraft's tap-a-block-get-an-ingot logic with real material science — knapping, pit kilns, bloomeries and alloy ratios you actually have to measure — sold direct from the developer for one flat price with no storefront in between.
8.4 / 10
A frozen-apocalypse city-builder that plays fair for the first month and then quietly hands the server to whoever's alliance has the deepest wallets — the honest question isn't whether it's generous early on, it's where that generosity actually stops.
6.5 / 10
A city builder that refuses to let any settlement become permanent, banking what you learn into a roguelite meta-progression layer instead. It is one of the only games in its genre to treat the endgame as a design problem worth solving rather than a state to reach and stop.
8.5 / 10
A solo-developed hybrid that welds grand-strategy nation management onto clicker mechanics — genuinely novel in concept, but a divisive combat rework, opaque economy and buggy pathfinding have left its Early Access reception stuck at Mixed.
6 / 10
