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 single-player RPG built to feel like a classic MMORPG raid night, populated entirely by NPC "SimPlayers" who level, group up and loot alongside you — a genuinely novel hook wrapped around an Early Access game still finding its footing on UI, quest clarity and combat feedback.
7.5 / 10
A single-shard spaceship MMO where losses are permanent, the economy is entirely player-built, and your character keeps training on a real-world clock whether you're logged in or not. Twenty-three years old, recently rebranded by its own studio, and still the sharpest argument in the genre for why risk has to be real to mean anything.
8 / 10
A free, open-source browser incremental that takes a species from primordial ooze to interstellar empire across thirteen distinct reset layers — one of the deepest idle games ever built, and one of the least interested in explaining any of it to you.
7.5 / 10
Erik Asmussen rebuilds his own factory-town formula from the ground up around a controllable avatar, a hungry volcano deity and a full ocean of islands — a sequel that risks alienating veterans of the original in its opening hours before proving, mechanic by mechanic, that almost every change was worth making.
8 / 10
Erik Asmussen strips the conveyor belts and airships out of his own Factory Town and rebuilds the same economy as a menu-driven idle game — a genuinely distinct reimagining that nails offline progression but never quite explains the numbers it wants you to obsess over.
7.5 / 10
A hand-drawn roguelite about drilling planet cores and ploughing the profits back into a growing mining corporation — a genuinely addictive loop wrapped around a confusing interface and a late game that never quite finds a second gear.
7 / 10
A short, gleefully mean-spirited incremental game about getting rich by making pollution worse — genuinely funny in its first half hour, and honest that there isn't much more than that first half hour to find.
6.5 / 10
The free open world is good enough to carry a full-price game on its own — climbing, gliding and elemental combat form one of the best traversal systems in the genre. What you pay for is everything above the story campaign, and the review is really about where that line sits.
8 / 10
A turn-based sci-fi RPG that bets its entire retention strategy on writing rather than combat, and mostly wins that bet. The Weakness Break system is a genuinely good reason to play manually, right up until Quick Clear and auto-battle quietly convince you not to bother.
7.5 / 10
A cheap, good-looking incremental about feeding a black hole until it either swallows a leaderboard spot or collapses on you, undercut by a threadbare research tree and a wave of recent reviews accusing the whole project of being thrown together with AI.
6 / 10
Grumpy Rhino Games' 2018 cult-tycoon idler turns its tower into an actual production chain instead of an upgrade list, and its Idol-summoning prestige loop still holds up — but the studio has settled into bug-fix-only maintenance, and there's little new to chase for anyone who cleared the tower years ago.
6.5 / 10
A budget dark-fantasy clicker where you tap cultists back into worshipers with a cross, told across twelve moody pixel-art areas — handsome and short enough not to overstay its welcome, but dogged by accusations that its loop is a close reskin of another incremental.
6.5 / 10
A dice-rolling incremental from solo developer Lutsgames that sells itself on genuine randomness, then spends its entire upgrade tree quietly smoothing that randomness away — and the game is more interesting for admitting it can't have both.
6.5 / 10
A post-apocalyptic idle game built around a genuine grid-inventory puzzle rather than a spreadsheet of upgrade buttons, undercut by a prestige system that does the math against itself and timers that make "idle" feel like the wrong word for long stretches of it.
6.5 / 10
A decade-old idle gacha RPG whose real currency was never gold, it was your own heroes — and the star-fusion system that consumes them is both the smartest thing about the game and the reason its economy is so hard to defend.
6 / 10
A free browser incremental where every attempt is a program — a fixed mana budget, an action queue you write in advance, and a loop that runs it out to the letter. Skills carry over between attempts, the interface never stops being a spreadsheet with buttons, and the game has outlived three different maintainers without ever quite finishing.
7.5 / 10
Kolibri Games' decade-old mobile idle didn't just popularise the miner-elevator-warehouse loop, it more or less invented the template every mining incremental since has copied. Ten years and a Ubisoft acquisition later, the loop still works — the monetisation menu and the interface built on top of it are where the wear shows.
6.5 / 10
Tech Tree Games' 2019 space-mining idle has outlasted most of its mobile peers by giving the genre's usual ore-and-upgrade loop a manager layer, a reset-friendly prestige system and weekly ranked tournaments — then undercutting some of that goodwill with a loot-box-flagged IAP menu and a persistent offline-tracking bug.
7 / 10
A free chemistry-themed incremental from a solo mobile developer, with real scale on Android and iOS and a stalled, near-invisible Steam release that has sat in Early Access for four years while its developer's attention has moved to an unannounced sequel.
6 / 10
A free-to-play incremental about growing a one-person garage venture into a tech empire, with a genuinely honest monetisation model let down by a midgame economy that stops making sense and a content well that runs dry fast.
6 / 10
A clicker-and-tower-defense hybrid that hands you a kingdom, a skill tree and a cursor to slaughter with — engaging for its first couple of hours, then undercut by a skill tree that finishes long before the fighting does.
6 / 10
A solo developer's yard-cleanup incremental turns raking leaves into a genuine tool-upgrade power fantasy — reviewed for whether a two-hour runtime and a single backyard are worth the Overwhelmingly Positive reputation, or just too little game for the price of admission.
6.5 / 10
A five-dollar semi-idle RPG that sends three-adventurer teams into dungeons on their own while you sort, salvage and re-gear what they drag back — and a look at whether that loop still has somewhere to go once the opening classes stop being new.
7.5 / 10
A gridless medieval city builder whose household-level burgage plot simulation is the best idea the genre has produced in years, sold on a trailer full of battles it mostly doesn't deliver. Two years and change into Early Access, the honest question isn't whether it's good — it's whether "still becoming" is a fair state to sell it in.
7 / 10
