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 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
