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.
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
An idle game about writing software that picks the smartest possible theme for the genre — and then hits a scaling wall a few tiers in, while its design is still being rewritten in public.
6 / 10
Read review of Yet Another Incremental Game (but this time about coding)
Heroes of Tomorrow: Hidden Potential is Choice of Games' latest text-based interactive novel, a 600,000-word superhero story that drops the player into Evos Academy as a newly-
7 / 10
"Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!" Lost In Space - The First Adventure is a 3D point-and-click adventure built entirely around that one piece of pop-culture furniture — a l
6 / 10
Mi Lirong is fresh out of college, newly employed, and just been told by her doctor that she is at risk of diabetes. While night-jogging to try to fix that, she runs into He Siqiu,
7 / 10
KONAMI's action-RPG adaptation of Hiro Mashima's manga trades budget and polish for genuine affection for its source material, delivering a combat system that starts stiff but blossoms, a story that ends before it should, and one of the deepest costume systems in anime gaming.
6 / 10
Read review of EDENS ZERO Review: A Scrappy, Sincere Trip Through Hiro Mashima's Cosmos
