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 $2.99 voice-controlled spell duel that turned a solo developer's Early Access experiment into one of 2025's biggest indie surprises — a year on, the novelty has mostly held, but the update cadence and the mic's grasp of accents have not kept pace.
7 / 10
A factory-automation puzzle game where you cut, stamp, and paint your own voxel building parts, then squeeze the whole production line onto a sky island with a real, paid ceiling on space. Polished and distinctive, but priced like the genre giants it can't yet match in scale.
7 / 10
A solo developer's first-person melee roguelike spent two and a half years in Early Access before its 1.0 finally gave the combat a story worth finishing and a boss worth building toward.
8 / 10
A top-down sandbox RPG that spent six years in Early Access building the one system that actually separates it from the Terraria-likes around it — recruit settlers, hand them jobs, and your colony keeps working while you're off fighting something in a cave.
8 / 10
A free semi-idle RPG that builds a genuinely deep class-and-itemization sandbox — six classes, twelve specializations, three layers of gear tinkering — and then locks most of it behind a level-35 wall where the gold and rune economy stops keeping up.
6.5 / 10
A three-to-four-hour premium incremental about harvesting nodes and defending against waves of invaders, built with a hard ending instead of an infinite number-go-up treadmill — and popular enough to spawn an entire micro-genre of imitators.
8 / 10
Barrel Smash Studios' two-person Early Access debut drowns the world and asks you to build a colony on whatever's still floating — rafts, sinking islands, shark attacks and a corporate conspiracy buried in scavenged bunkers, all wrapped around a Rimworld-flavoured survivor sim.
7.5 / 10
A one-person incremental where you orbit a planet, drill it out from a laser turret, and work through four hazard-themed seasons to reach the core — a chill, cheap loop with a travel-time problem the developer never quite solves.
6.5 / 10
A non-idle incremental where every resource tick comes from casting spell combos yourself rather than watching a timer, built around a genuinely novel glyph-alchemy system for crafting your own spells from scratch.
8 / 10
A co-op mining sim where the underground has no fixed layout, bolted onto a genuine factory-automation game — dig your own tunnels with a squad of up to four, then turn what you find into a production line with conveyor belts, robots, and delivery contracts.
7.5 / 10
Twelve years into Early Access, the isometric zombie survival sandbox just shipped its biggest update ever and got multiplayer back. The skill grind is still the best in the genre; the menus are still the reason half the people who buy it never see it.
8.3 / 10
An incremental mining game that turns "swing the pickaxe" into a real progression system — eight hand-designed layers, a 150-node permanent skill tree, and a four-hour runtime that ends before the loop wears out its welcome.
8 / 10
A Melvor-flavoured skilling idler with eighteen skills and a collection log, sold as a clean one-time purchase — but a boost mechanic that gates achievements and a rocky launch identity crisis keep it from matching the game everyone will compare it to.
6.5 / 10
Cup Dog Games' debut strips the Soulslike down to nothing but boss fights, built around a Focus-and-Mark system that turns every encounter into a duel over who blinks first — and then asks its best players to do the whole thing again without getting hit once.
8 / 10
Jagex takes twenty-five years of RuneScape skill icons and welds them onto a Valheim-shaped survival loop. Fifteen months into Early Access, with a 1.0 date now on the calendar, the question is whether the skilling actually survived the move or just changed clothes.
7.5 / 10
A co-op sky-island survival game that trades hunger bars and monsters for solar panels and delivery drones — charming and genuinely clever in its energy systems, but its progression runs out of new ideas long before the credits.
6.5 / 10
A pixel-art MMO built around reshuffling roguelite dungeons and a player-run overworld, launched into Early Access carrying the baggage of its previous life as an NFT game.
6.5 / 10
A 2D pixel-art roguelite that pairs jianghu-flavoured build crafting with creature collecting, and five months of steady free patches since its February launch.
7.3 / 10
Orangepixel's turn-based space roguelike gets a time-loop makeover, and the smartest decision it makes is turning "you died" into "you left something behind" instead of "start over."
7.8 / 10
A tile-by-tile spaceship colony sim where you build the hull, route the gas pipes, and keep a crew of civilians fed, breathing, and sane while you search a procedural galaxy for a new home. Reached 1.0 in May 2026 after six years in Early Access.
8 / 10
A turn-based hero collector that grafts Uma Musume's training sim onto Honkai: Star Rail-style combat, with presentation to match — undercut by optimisation problems and a PvP ladder that leans harder on spending than its otherwise generous gacha deserves.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed space factory incremental with a five-hour campaign and a clean ending instead of an endless ladder. The idea is refreshing; the execution runs out of steam exactly when the prestige system should be taking over.
6.5 / 10
Netmarble folds its 25-year-old dinosaur-taming franchise into an idle deck-builder, and the 24-unit battles are genuinely more tactical than the "auto-play RPG" label suggests — right up until the real-time PvP mode starts pricing in who's willing to spend.
6.5 / 10
An auto-battler where you never touch the character directly, animated entirely in ASCII art, and built around Stonescript — a real scripting language for programming your own companion's combat behaviour instead of just watching it fight.
7.5 / 10
