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.
Nine years on, the game that taught Larian how to build Baldur's Gate 3 is still the sharper tactical puzzle of the two — a combat system built from fire, water and armour that rewards a party that thinks in physics, and a brutal opening act that punishes one that doesn't.
8.5 / 10
Klei's co-op survival sandbox turns Wilson's original nightmare into a shared one, where the real threat isn't the Deerclops so much as what happens when nobody on the team remembers it's coming. A decade of free content updates against 49 mostly-cosmetic DLC entries makes it a genuinely useful case study in how to monetise a survival game politely.
8.5 / 10
BioWare builds its most mechanically confident combat in the series, then spends most of the RPG scaffolding around it — choice continuity, itemization, party structure — to do it, leaving a fun action game wearing a Dragon Age name plenty of longtime fans don't recognise.
6.5 / 10
Capcom's open-world action RPG is built around a genuinely strange idea — AI companions on loan from other players' worlds — wrapped in a combat system that rewards climbing monsters like furniture and a map that punishes you for wanting to skip the walk. Two-plus years of patches have quietly answered most of its launch complaints; the review score never fully recovered from asking anyway.
7.5 / 10
A factory-automation game whose endgame isn't a bigger number but a visible megastructure eclipsing a star. Five years into Early Access, the premise is still the best in the genre — the question is whether the game around it has caught up.
7.5 / 10
A Sword Art Online action RPG that finally lets you build a hero of your own inside Aincrad, with tight Souls-inflected combat and a genuinely sharp partner-synergy system — undercut by a linear, quest-marker world and a $69.99 asking price that assumes you'll buy back in for the DLC.
6.5 / 10
A decade-old mobile idle game about running a chicken farm into the stratosphere, held together by a prestige loop, an artifact-crafting layer, and — unusually for the genre — timed co-op contracts that only work if other people show up.
8 / 10
FromSoftware took the tight, authored corridors of the Souls formula and let them loose across an entire continent, trading hand-guided pacing for a world you're free to get lost, lost again, and overpowered in on your own terms.
9 / 10
FromSoftware compresses Soulslike boss combat into 40-minute three-player runs, trading Elden Ring's open-ended build freedom for ten fixed heroes, a shrinking map and a clock that never stops.
7.5 / 10
A voxel survival game that welds on a real RPG skill tree and dares you to dig, sculpt and build inside a world that is actively trying to kill you on a clock. Two and a half years into Early Access, with a 1.0 date finally on the calendar, the question is whether the fog and the talent tree were ever really talking to each other.
7.5 / 10
A ground-up rethink of 1999 EverQuest that solves the original's group-or-quit problem with a three-class multiclass system, then complicates its own launch week with a subscription, a cash shop and a beta that visibly shrank player storage before anyone had paid for it.
7 / 10
A free-to-play, IdleOn-flavoured AFK RPG that gets the offline-progression fundamentals right and stays refreshingly uncomplicated early on, but ships an MMO label its actual single-player design doesn't earn and sharpens its monetisation considerably once the early Acts are behind you.
6.5 / 10
A math-themed mobile incremental whose real product isn't the eight-chapter story but the JavaScript SDK sitting underneath it — a scripting layer that turns the community into an unofficial content team.
8 / 10
A game about ratios, throughput and the compulsion to make one number slightly bigger than it was five minutes ago, built with an engine precise enough to run that compulsion at a million entities without falling over. Ten years on, it is still the reference point every other automation game gets measured against.
9.5 / 10
A free idle RPG about killing an infinite number of potatoes that turns out to have one of the most patient, best-supported progression systems in the genre, and very little interest in pressuring anyone to pay for it.
7.5 / 10
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
