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 party-based incremental RPG that hands you only the healer and makes that the whole point — 200-plus skill-tree nodes built around keeping a self-sufficient, self-important party alive, wrapped in a tight four-hour campaign that starts stronger than it finishes.
7.5 / 10
A free, long-abandoned browser incremental that bakes the escalating "nerf gauntlet" of hardcore Antimatter Dimensions mods directly into its base game — a genuinely distinct idea, shipped by one hobbyist developer, that stopped receiving content five years before this review.
4.5 / 10
Fifteen years past release, the hardest part of reviewing Minecraft isn't judging whether it's good — it's telling a new buyer which of its two incompatible engines to actually install, and being honest about what stopped changing while the block count kept climbing.
9 / 10
Kopla Games' minimalist auto-run dungeon crawler grew a sequel's worth of heroes, guilds and elemental gear over seven years of live support, and the one thing that didn't survive the expansion is the thing its name promised.
6.5 / 10
A decade-long Early Access project finally becomes a finished game, and it's still the only MMORPG where getting cursed into a cow is a legitimate build.
7.5 / 10
A turn-based extraction roguelike where every mercenary is a disposable clone, every mission can end in a single unlucky turn, and the cosmic horror waiting beneath the corporate PMC contracts is exactly as unforgiving as the combat.
8 / 10
The most-mocked mobile game on the internet turns out to be running one of the deeper gear-optimisation systems in the genre underneath its meme reputation — the honest problem isn't that Raid is shallow, it's how much of your week the energy bar and the shard economy are willing to take.
6.5 / 10
An idle farming sim that gave up on being a game you look at, and became the desktop companion the whole genre now copies — charming and honest about its own smallness, if a little thin once the farm is built out.
8.5 / 10
A top-down action-roguelite from the studio behind Dungreed, built around a Tetris-style artifact inventory that turns loadout planning into its own puzzle game — dense, generous with content, and let down late by a damage-sponge final boss and a steep endgame DPS wall.
8 / 10
A dark fantasy RPG that replaces turns and mana with a shared deck and a countdown clock — every card you play buys time against the enemy's next move, and every hero draws from the same pool of cards.
7.5 / 10
A dead adventurer comes back as a skeleton shopkeep and starts hiring the living to die in his place — Xtonomous's solo-developed idle sim turns that morbid joke into a genuinely connected hire-loot-sell loop, then keeps things deliberately short instead of chasing the usual idle-game grind.
7.5 / 10
A pixel-art dungeon crawler where a slot machine decides what's waiting on every floor — enemies, loot and spells all drawn as reel symbols you then have to walk up to and fight, not wager on. Distinctive, generous with content, and rougher around the edges than its 1.0 label suggests.
7 / 10
A free turn-based idle dungeon crawler that bolts Clicker Heroes-style ascension onto a tavern full of soda-fuelled adventurers, charming enough that thousands of players still recommend it a decade after it started life as a mobile game.
7 / 10
The mobile gacha RPG that the rest of the genre was quietly built on top of is still running twelve years later, and the direct ancestry to Raid: Shadow Legends' gear system makes it the rare case where reviewing the original after the imitation actually changes the verdict.
7 / 10
A pixel-art village-and-heroes RPG from the Punch Club and Graveyard Keeper studios that markets itself as idle and plays like a part-time job — genuinely funny writing and strong art undercut by a loop that never lets go of the mouse.
5.5 / 10
A shipwrecked hero levels up by winning minigames, not by clicking through menus. SoulGame Studio's sequel to its cult flash hit turns stat training into the whole game, and that idea is both the best and most exhausting thing about it.
7.5 / 10
An automation game that skips the usual pretend-programming abstractions and just hands you a Python-shaped scripting language, then asks you to actually write the loops and functions that run your farm. The rare "learn to code" game that works as a game first.
8.5 / 10
A build-crafting incremental about small creatures smashing a rock for wealth, where the usual "number always goes up" comfort is replaced by permanent choices that can genuinely sabotage a run.
8 / 10
Nineteen years old and still the only MMO that treats Tolkien's geography and timeline as a design constraint rather than a skin. Reviewed with Kingdoms of Harad current, asking what that licence discipline actually buys a player in 2026 — and what a new one genuinely has to pay to see it.
7 / 10
A free browser incremental whose entire subject is the prestige mechanic other incrementals treat as scaffolding — thirty-one reset layers stacked on top of each other, and the accidental parent of a modding framework that a very long tail of hobbyist developers have since built their own games on.
7 / 10
A tap-a-floor idle tower climber wrapped in Chinese mythology, with a genuinely tactile summon-and-collide combat loop undercut by a real-money marketplace that sells stat-buffing skins and a tutorial that explains almost nothing.
5.5 / 10
Proton Studio put a first-person gun in the clicker genre's most abstract hand, turning "tap the cookie" into "shoot the cube wall." The framing genuinely changes the opening hours, but the studio moved on to two spiritual successors years ago and hasn't touched this one since a December 2021 holiday event.
6 / 10
A solo developer's follow-up to Magic Archery swaps archery for architecture, building an incremental around growing a single wizard's tower toward a definite, well-earned ending rather than an infinite number-go-up treadmill.
8 / 10
A tactical fantasy RPG where you never actually give a combat order — you write a standing set of instructions for each unit and then watch your army carry them out, which makes it one of the closest things a big-budget console release has come to an automation game.
8 / 10
