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.
The second act of the Remake trilogy trades Midgar's corridors for open regions, a deep Synergy-and-Folio combat system and a genuinely excellent card game — then buries a chunk of it under checklist busywork and a PC port that still stutters a year on.
8 / 10
A subscription MMORPG where one character can learn every job in the game, and where the story you're required to sit through before reaching the current patch has grown into a decade-plus commitment. Reviewed with Dawntrail current and patch 7.55 freshly out.
8.5 / 10
A hero-collecting idle RPG with real longevity behind it — five years in Early Access, fifteen-plus progression systems and no priced Steam DLC — undercut by a currency count that outgrows the player's patience and a guild structure that quietly punishes anyone without an active group.
6.5 / 10
A roguelike deckbuilder where your deck is literally the train you've assembled car by car, and every collision on the tactical grid can chain into a fight-ending disaster for whoever's standing in the way.
7.5 / 10
A pencil-drawn tactics RPG where combat plays out on a shared timeline both sides can sabotage, off to a strong start on a tiny early sample and a distinctive hook, with a controller gap and an unproven long game keeping the verdict cautious three days after launch.
7.5 / 10
A side-scrolling idle ARPG that spent years quietly growing one of the clicker genre's largest skill trees in Early Access, then wrapped it in an energy-gated click system, RNG loot chests and a shard shop slow enough that a meaningful minority of players call the whole thing a grind built to sell its own solution.
6 / 10
A decade-old action RPG that just got a real tenth mastery and a third of a new map, proving Crate Entertainment still has more to say — even if the engine underneath it never stopped being from 2016.
8.5 / 10
No subscription, no level-cap treadmill and, fourteen years on, still no level 81 — Guild Wars 2's horizontal progression is either the smartest bet the MMO genre ever made or a slow-burn excuse for six expansions of buy-in. Reviewed with Visions of Eternity live.
8.5 / 10
Supergiant welded a fully voiced, choice-reactive narrative onto the bones of a permadeath roguelite and made death itself the mechanism that moves the story forward — a look at why the original Hades still reads as close to a solved design problem five years and one full sequel later.
9 / 10
Chasing Carrots dressed a Vampire Survivors loop in Diablo's dark isometric skin and then buried it under one of the deepest meta-progression trees the survivor-like genre has — a review of what that unlock grind buys you, and what happens to the screen once it pays off.
8 / 10
A genuinely impressive Unreal Engine 5 remake of the campaign that built a franchise, shipped with one enormous, deliberate omission — every scrap of the multiplayer that kept people playing the original for twenty years.
7 / 10
Orna's class-and-gear rulebook, unplugged from GPS and pinned to a handcrafted continent instead. The systems survive the transplant; the thing that made its sibling famous doesn't.
7 / 10
The officially licensed D&D idle game turns line-up positioning into a real tactical puzzle, then buries that good idea under one of the most persistent monetisation engines in the idle genre.
6.5 / 10
A cheap Melvor-style idle RPG whose worker-automation system is a genuine bright spot, undercut by additive scaling that stalls progress hard past the opening days and by flavour text several players independently flag as AI-written.
5.5 / 10
An idle RPG that swaps the genre's usual real-time clock for something stranger — your knight levels up from the mouse clicks and keystrokes you make in other programs entirely.
6.5 / 10
A paid idle RPG that piles five separate game modes, 125+ powers and a full forging-and-prestige stack onto a post-apocalyptic hero — genuinely deep for the genre, but still working out UI bugs and an overwhelming opening hour a month after launch.
7 / 10
A turn-based idle grinder built around hiring the monsters you've just killed, with a genuinely clever risk-versus-reward twist buried under a spreadsheet-dense interface and a release so quiet that Steam has barely registered it exists.
6 / 10
Lavaflame2's first idle game, and the direct ancestor of Legends of Idleon — the same skill-web formula in a single character, a smaller shop and a much shorter session length.
6.5 / 10
A side-scrolling idle RPG that dares to make its active layer matter — timing jumps through coin trails pays out far more than watching the run play itself, right up until the moment you close the app and the game quietly goes back to being a spreadsheet.
7.5 / 10
A 2019 Steam idle-RPG where the class you pick isn't a build for life — it's a costume you're expected to change every run, and the game is built to make that swapping the whole point.
7.5 / 10
A free browser idler from 2014 that outgrew Kongregate, landed on Steam in 2016, and has spent over a decade turning shadow clones and god fights into one of the genre's longest and most demanding progression ladders.
7 / 10
A minimalist incremental where every life is a countdown to a death that actually matters — the queue you plan, the story chapter you're on, and the instincts you've earned all carry forward, right up until the game itself stopped moving forward three years ago.
7 / 10
A dense, genuinely deep idle RPG from solo Japanese developer Hapiwaku that gives six heroes real class and skill decisions, then buries a chunk of its quality-of-life behind a premium coin store steep enough to have turned a chunk of its own audience against it.
6 / 10
Warhorse Studios' medieval simulation grows up without losing its stubbornness — a sequel that fixes the first game's roughest edges while doubling down on the idea that realism should cost you something. The result is one of the most complete RPGs of the last few years, provided you're willing to let a swordfight or a bowl of stew go badly.
8.5 / 10
