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 one-person dungeon-management sim where you wall off rooms, seed traps and synthesise monsters to grind down invading adventurers. The pitch has real bones, but its entire English Steam review history — three reviews, all negative — describes a game that stopped short of finishing itself.
3.2 / 10
The 1999 Bullfrog classic that put you on the evil side of a fantasy dungeon, reissued on Steam in 2024 as a straight port of the GOG build. The dungeon-management design still holds up completely. Whether the executable does depends entirely on your PC.
6.5 / 10
Bullfrog's 1997 dungeon-management classic, still playing the villain better than almost anything made since — re-released on Steam in March 2024 as an unmodified DOSBox port that the community immediately routes around with a free fan-made engine.
8 / 10
A genuinely addictive choose-your-own-adventure-style permadeath RPG ported from mobile, let down by a corroborated late-game softlock bug, rough mobile-port controls, and a store-page "constant updates" claim this review's own check found doesn't hold up.
6.2 / 10
A genre-defining colony sim capable of genuinely unmatched emergent storytelling, undercut by a UI that even loyal thousand-hour players still call clunky, a brutal onboarding curve, and real, well-documented performance and bug problems that persist years after its celebrated Steam release.
8 / 10
A Warcraft III mod with over five million downloads gets rebuilt from the ground up as a standalone tower defense, elemental towers and all — Very Positive on Steam, but its own community is now its biggest bottleneck.
7.4 / 10
A solo-developer idle empire-builder from Pixelabor — harvest wood and stone, build five structures, toggle an auto-battle against a numbered ladder of enemies — whose own store page still calls itself a free game more than five years after Steam started charging NZ$4.79 for it, with zero user reviews on record either way.
4.5 / 10
A free, mouse-only danmaku dodging game where the only input is your cursor — reviewed on every single review it has ever received, all 32 of them, because the sample is small enough to read in full rather than trust a percentage.
7.4 / 10
A free-to-play dungeon crawler built from a mobile game's bones, with real depth in its character creation and guild skill trees but a menu system that never stopped assuming you're holding a phone.
6 / 10
A well-crafted reverse-escape-room puzzler from an actively supported studio, undercut for a large share of reviewers by puzzles that lean on unclear logic leaps rather than fair deduction, and a co-op structure that leaves one partner idle for long stretches.
6.1 / 10
A 1997 Acorn RISC OS cult classic from future Deck13 co-founder Jan Klose gets its first-ever PC release — a genuinely deep 4X of colonization, law-making and tactical combat wrapped in a steep learning curve and a deliberately period-accurate 256-colour look.
7.2 / 10
A beloved 2004 action RPG trapped inside a decade-plus of consistent "lazy remaster" complaints — no PC mouse support, camera and performance issues still reported in 2026 — with reviewers steadily recommending the older, cheaper Fable: The Lost Chapters instead.
6 / 10
The franchise's current entry brings a genuinely better-looking, better-sounding engine and three new regions, but a large share of its own veteran audience says content was cut rather than added relative to Farming Simulator 22 — and the DLC structure has grown to two full season passes plus a dozen standalone equipment packs.
7 / 10
A budget tractor-and-crop sim from Gameza Studio that asks under three dollars and, going by its own tiny review sample, mostly delivers a stuck tractor, a touchy camera and an arbitrary plowing timer for the price.
3.5 / 10
A near-universally loved remaster of the genre-defining 1997 tactical RPG, undercut for a large share of its 4,979 English reviewers by one decision that has nothing to do with the game itself — Denuvo DRM that requires an online check even in single-player.
7.5 / 10
Read review of FINAL FANTASY TACTICS - The Ivalice Chronicles
A four-soldier squad, an alien invasion in the Ural mountains, and an action-point system where reloading a rifle costs almost your whole turn. There's a real tactics game trying to get out from under the jank — the question is whether NZ$14.75 is enough to forgive the jank first.
5.5 / 10
Read review of Future War Tactics: SOF vs Alien Invasion – Turn-Based Strategy
Afil Games' budget arena survivor puts a gladiator through waves of beasts and rivals with seven selectable weapons and stack-your-own-build upgrades. It's cheap and the hook works for a while, but a defense-stacking exploit, a stuck small window and a three-year-old broken achievement drag it down.
4.5 / 10
A one-developer gladiator hack-and-slash that launched in 2018 as a stripped-down single-player sliver of a much bigger multiplayer Roman-arena RPG its own official website still describes as "upcoming" and "in alpha" — three Steam reviews total, and the one detailed negative report says the settings menu doesn't work.
3.2 / 10
A calm, procedurally generated Finnish-mythology city-builder about goblins, water and the turning of the seasons — recently out of two years of Early Access, and still short on the reasons to keep watching after your first winter.
6.4 / 10
BitBorne Studio's co-op mining survival game sends up to four goblins into a destructible mine with laser drills, rail carts and a darkness-drains-your-sanity torch system. Two months after launch it's Very Positive on Steam for exactly the reason its own reviewers keep repeating — brilliant with friends, rough around nearly every edge.
7 / 10
A decade-refined mobile hit about reading a rival's mood in a pizza order — charming, funny, and still selling the same diamonds it sold on your phone.
6.7 / 10
Read review of Good Pizza, Great Pizza - Cooking Simulator Game
A mobile idle-grind game ported to Steam with its microtransactions stripped but its free-to-play repetition intact — genuinely fun in short, cheap-sale bursts, but widely described as overpriced for what's essentially a phone game with crash bugs and missing sound effects.
4 / 10
An ambitious colonial-fantasy RPG from a small studio that reviewers consistently describe as two different games — a genuinely great opening act, and a back half of repetitive fetch quests that several fans only got through with the help of community mods.
6.5 / 10
SoftCowGames' free tower-defense idler has a real early hook — upgrade a castle, unlock weapon tiers, farm bosses for legendary loot — but years of player reviews describe the same save-corruption bugs, a 10%-only offline rate and shop pricing that turns "just cosmetic" into a running joke.
5.2 / 10
