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.
Tactical Adventures' sequel moves to Unreal Engine 5 and the newly revised SRD 5.2 ruleset, and its Early Access build proves the tactics still work — while making clear that a buyer today is paying full price for roughly ten hours of a much longer game still being built.
6.5 / 10
A potato-powered clicker that spends its idle timers on story instead of retention, and then does the one thing almost nothing in the genre does — it actually finishes.
8 / 10
A decade on, the thing that still makes Stardew Valley work isn't the farm, it's the clock — energy, daylight and a hard seasonal deadline turned into the best progression pressure the genre has ever built, even if the pressure quietly switches off once you're rich.
9 / 10
A 2014 browser incremental where larvae become drones, drones become queens and queens build nests — one of the earliest games to make a production chain the entire point, later rebuilt in 3D as the free-to-play Swarm Simulator: Evolution on Steam and Android.
6.5 / 10
A free browser incremental built by two developers since 2019, stacking Prestige into Transcension into Reincarnation into Ascension into Singularity — more reset layers than almost anything in the genre, though not every one of them changes what the layer below it means.
6.5 / 10
A first-person open-world RPG built openly in the shape of Skyrim, but set in a bleaker, more literary Arthurian world where night itself turns hostile — ambitious, well-written and visibly under-budgeted in the faces of the people telling its story.
7.5 / 10
Game Hive's decade-old idle RPG builds its whole second act around clans and scheduled tournaments — a structure that gives its artifact-and-relic progression somewhere real to point, but also turns a genre built for "check back later" into a calendar commitment with a very tall premium-currency ladder sitting next to it.
7 / 10
A Scottish-flavoured Dynasty Warriors crossed with Risk of Rain 2, with genuinely praised combat, art direction and co-op carrying a large, consistent Steam review sample past a stingy meta-progression economy and some rough Early Access edges.
7.5 / 10
A 2011 sandbox that turned "dig, build, fight" into a full RPG and never stopped growing — fifteen years and counting of free updates, still one of the best-value games on Steam.
9.5 / 10
Twelve years and eight chapters after launch, The Elder Scrolls Online still lets you start anywhere and stay relevant everywhere. Level scaling bought that freedom; the trade-off is a levelling arc with no real stakes and a monetisation model dense enough to need a spreadsheet. Reviewed with Season One: Return of the Thieves Guild live.
7.5 / 10
Fifteen years on, Skyrim's open world is still the reason people play it — walk in any direction and something is there. The systems underneath that world, from swordplay to loot to the dialogue tree, have aged a lot less gracefully, and Bethesda has spent a decade finding new ways to resell the same game. Reviewed as Skyrim Special Edition, the version Steam actually sells you today.
8 / 10
The first 3D Zelda didn't just adapt a 2D formula to a new dimension — it solved the problems that new dimension created, and the industry has been using its answers ever since. A retrospective on the N64 original, with a clear steer on which version to actually play today.
9.5 / 10
A tower-defence game, a factory incremental and a scripting sandbox welded into one free island, where the real endgame is writing the AI that plays it for you.
7.5 / 10
Eleven years and one free next-gen overhaul later, CD Projekt Red's open-world epic is still best understood through its side quests rather than its main story — and its combat, inventory and level-gating have aged in ways the writing never did.
9 / 10
NC's weapon-swap MMORPG delivers the best guild siege in the genre right now and asks a real question about what its Auction House and $50 Character Boost actually buy. Reviewed with The Frozen Divide: Nix (level cap 60) live and Update 4.3.0's Battlegrounds season running.
6.5 / 10
A free seasonal ARPG that borrows the Torchlight name and little of its soul, built instead around a genuinely deep hero-trait talent system, gacha pets that quietly cross the line the developer said it wouldn't cross, and a trade market that taxes you on the way out.
6.5 / 10
A free browser incremental that has been running since 2015 — trap creatures, build a war economy out of them, and watch a soft-reset loop of zones, portals and heliums turn into one of the deepest progression systems the genre has ever built.
7.5 / 10
A free browser incremental that spends its first ten minutes as a joke and its last hour as a genuinely tense endgame, built around a premise everyone already half-knows and a structure that keeps rewriting the rules underneath it.
8.5 / 10
A Viking survival sandbox that gates its whole progression behind biomes, each one resetting your sense of safety from zero. Five and a half years into Early Access, with a firm 1.0 date finally on the calendar, it's worth asking how much of that reputation still holds.
8.5 / 10
Poncle stripped aiming and attacking out of the action-roguelite formula and the result became one of the decade's most copied designs — a review of what actually holds four years later, now that the screen-filling spectacle has become the whole pitch.
9 / 10
A free-to-play space-ninja shooter that has been adding systems since 2013 without ever taking one away. Genuinely one of the most generous live-service games on the market, and one of the hardest to explain to a friend. Reviewed with Jade Shadows: Constellations current.
8 / 10
A turn-based CRPG that hands you a voidship, a dynasty's fortune and the Imperium's blessing to do almost anything with both — built on a career system that turns absurd by the final act, and shipped rough enough at launch that its current, patched shape is a genuinely different game to review.
7.5 / 10
Shiro Games' open-world mercenary RPG treats a company of sellswords as a small business — wages, food, gear repair and prisoners are the real spreadsheet, and combat is what happens when that spreadsheet goes wrong.
8 / 10
A free text-based idle RPG with more than 3,000 branching story actions and a genuinely active five-year development history, buried behind one of the least welcoming first hours the genre has to offer.
6.5 / 10
