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.
Poncle and Nosebleed Interactive take the cast of a bullet-heaven phenomenon and lock them into turn-based card combat instead. The pivot works far better than it has any right to, right up until the deck-breaking builds that make the genre fun also make the back half of a run trivial.
8 / 10
Read review of Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors
A solo-developed cyberpunk vampire RPG that pairs first-person exploration with XCOM-style overhead combat, wrapped around explicit adult content. The pieces are promising; almost none of them are finished yet.
5.5 / 10
An open-world witch adventure that swaps the usual survival toolbox for spellwork — spirit jumps instead of ladders, conjured forests instead of chopped trees, familiars instead of tames. Seven weeks into Early Access, the magic system is the best reason to be here; the world around it hasn't caught up yet.
6.5 / 10
A dungeon crawler that resurrects the original Wizardry's cruelty almost intact, then wraps it in a gacha character-summoning economy that never quite earns the same trust.
7 / 10
A Kickstarter-backed, pro-player-built sci-fi RTS that arrives in Early Access as the most credible StarCraft successor in years, welded to a commander RPG layer that mostly earns its place — if you're still willing to relearn macro from scratch.
7 / 10
A minimalist text-based incremental that spends its first act pretending to be nothing at all, then quietly reveals it was building a survival story out of firewood, huts and silence the whole time.
8 / 10
Lemonade stand to interplanetary conglomerate in three clicks and one very persistent gold shop. A forensic look at the idle clicker that made "buy, automate, reset" a mobile business model as much as a game design.
6 / 10
Hyper Hippo's second idle game keeps the lemonade-stand loop from AdVenture Capitalist and welds two new systems onto it — a per-resource Rank ladder and a Capsule gacha full of collectible Researcher cards. One of those additions is real strategic texture. The other is a lootbox.
5 / 10
The best-looking hero-collector on mobile pairs a genuinely thoughtful formation-based combat system with a gacha economy that turns its own leaderboards into the biggest reason to spend.
7 / 10
A classless sandbox MMORPG where every sword, ship and set of plate armour is player-made — and where losing a fight in the wrong zone means losing all of it. Nine years in, and now on Xbox, the question is whether that risk still teaches or just filters.
7.5 / 10
The free browser incremental that codified the modern reset ladder — dimensions into Infinity into Eternity into Reality — and is still the game every other prestige-layer idler is quietly measured against.
9 / 10
Obsidian trades the open world it once pitched for four dense, handcrafted regions of Eora, and the trade mostly pays off — sharp first-person combat and companions with real opinions, wrapped around a plague mystery that resolves faster than it deserves to.
7.5 / 10
LocalThunk's solo-developed poker roguelike turns chips times multiplier into the whole game — a review of how far that one exponential idea carries a run, and where the luck, the repetition and the small-screen text start to push back.
9 / 10
Three years and eight patches after launch, Larian's D&D epic is still the reference point for what "your choices matter" is supposed to mean — and its two real weaknesses, a lopsided third act and a ruleset that rewards system mastery over roleplay, haven't gone anywhere either.
9.5 / 10
A hacking-themed incremental where the automation you'd normally unlock with currency is automation you write yourself, in real JavaScript against a real API — free, open source, and still getting rewritten out from under its own players five years after launch.
8.5 / 10
Game Science builds an entire action RPG around the Destined One's staff and the Great Sage's shapeshifting, and lands one of the best boss rosters in the genre — inside a chapter structure that looks far more open than it actually plays.
8.5 / 10
Blobfish's one-person arena shooter hands a potato six weapon slots and lets stat stacking do the rest — a review of how far chips-in-the-shop decision-making carries a twenty-wave run, and where the plain presentation and a few solved builds hold it back.
8 / 10
A factory-automation colony sim where the terrain itself is a resource — you mine the ground you build on, dump waste that physically piles up, and the island's shape becomes a side effect of every production decision. Four years into Early Access, with two to four more to go by the developer's own estimate.
7.5 / 10
A free time-travel Sokoban puzzler that gets one specific, difficult idea exactly right — solving a puzzle by recording your own past actions and then working alongside the ghost of what you just did.
8.5 / 10
A genuinely deep idle civilization builder — a hundred-plus technologies, era-spanning wonders, a real global trading market — undercut by a headline feature that's been advertised for over a year without actually existing.
6.5 / 10
A turn-based RPG that makes you dodge and parry every enemy attack in real time, wrapped around a hand-painted Belle Époque France that's dying on a one-year clock — and one of the rare acclaimed games that earns the noise made about it.
9.5 / 10
The clicker that turned clicking optional — ascension, Hero Souls and the Ancients tree came from here, and the idle RPG genre never really left. A retrospective look at whether the game that built the template still deserves a slot in 2026.
7 / 10
Booming Tech's own developer FAQ promised this would not be a standalone game and would build on existing Conqueror's Blade characters. It shipped a week ago as a separate free Steam app with its own client, a gacha wall in front of core unit progression, and no siege matchmaking at launch — and 15% of roughly 1,950 Steam reviews are positive.
3 / 10
The game that accidentally invented the incremental genre in an evening, still actively updated thirteen years later — and still the yardstick every idle game gets measured against, for better and for worse.
8 / 10
