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 busier, more mechanically ambitious sibling to Holyday City Reloaded, wrapped around a King Midas fantasy — but its optional events lean harder into gambling than its stablemate ever did, and its last patch predates that game's too.
5.8 / 10
Home to one of the most inventive systems in action RPGs — a system its publisher then patented, blocking every other studio from building anything like it, a decision reviewers are still angry about years after the studio that made it, Monolith Productions, was shut down.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely well-regarded hidden-object mystery with strong art and atmosphere, undercut by a single, dominant, decade-old problem — broken Steam achievements that this review confirmed the developer never fixed, alongside real resolution and scaling issues on modern displays.
5.1 / 10
A Windows-98-styled incremental about building a weapons manufacturer from a single hand-cranked bullet press to a nuke, undone late by an achievement wave that broke 100% completion for a lot of the players who loved it most.
6.5 / 10
A NZ$7.39 solo-developer auto-battler about placing mercenaries in a small arena and watching the fight resolve — a coherent, fairly priced take on a crowded subgenre that has spent nearly eight months on Steam without attracting a single user review.
5.5 / 10
A charming, Pokemon-inspired monster-collection game with a genuinely fun core loop that its tiny review sample still enjoys — held back by real, repeated UI and control complaints that several reviewers feel give it an unfinished, Early-Access-adjacent feel despite shipping as a full release.
5.5 / 10
A free, short VR "edutainment" trip to a lunar base that genuinely charms the players who can get it working, undercut by severely inconsistent controller support that leaves a large share of reviewers unable to turn, move, or even start the experience at all.
3 / 10
A genuinely unsettling psychological horror story about grief and identity, praised even by its critics for atmosphere and sound design, undercut by one specific, near-universally disliked mechanic gating its true ending — an apple-picking replay loop several fans single out by name as the game's one real flaw.
7 / 10
A short, simple, family-friendly hidden-object mystery that most reviewers on both sides of the aggregate agree is enjoyable while it lasts — but too brief and too generic in its story for many to call it worth the full asking price.
5.8 / 10
A visually appealing mobile-derived hidden-object game, actively maintained with monthly updates, gated by an energy system nearly every negative reviewer says limits sessions to 10-15 minutes before demanding real money — including two independent, extremely long-tenured players who allege the game adapts its difficulty to spending behaviour, a claim this review could not verify but is reporting plainly given who's making it.
3.8 / 10
A roguelike deckbuilder with a genuinely clever hook — you choose which enemy attack hits you — trapped inside a game that left Early Access unfinished in February 2023 and hasn't been updated since.
5 / 10
A genuinely funny, distinctive premise — an undead bureaucrat balancing a skeleton army's budget — undercut by a near-total lack of onboarding, painfully mismatched sound design, and a missing save feature that's gone unpatched since the game's 2017 release.
3.8 / 10
A 2002 D&D CRPG whose real product, twenty-plus years on, is its legendary toolset and community-module ecosystem — sold under an "Enhanced Edition" label that its own launch-year reviewers overwhelmingly said promised more than it delivered.
7 / 10
A solid, well-liked ninth entry in a long-running time-management series, reviewed by an unusually small but uniformly positive sample this review read in full — a real signal of franchise reliability rather than an aggregate worth fully trusting on its own.
6.7 / 10
A basic but originally decent Flash-style stealth puzzler, now overwhelmingly defined by the developer's later addition of roughly 5,000 near-meaningless achievements — a widely condemned "achievement spam" update that reviewers say buried the actual game underneath it.
3.6 / 10
A solo-developed sci-fi colony sim with modular ships and a genuinely interesting machine-uprising threat, left to drift after a March 2025 launch while its one developer moved on to a different game.
5.5 / 10
A genuinely creative chess-variant creation engine sold at an unusually high price with a subscription-style monetisation structure baked in, real performance and multiplayer bugs, and one reviewer's "the game is shut down" claim this review found directly contradicted by the developer's own active update history through mid-2025.
4.5 / 10
A NZ$6.39 solo-dev idle clicker where you drag a collector circle across an overgrown field for timed harvest rounds, upgrading tools between them — let down by a Prestige system that resets nothing about how much your crops are worth.
6 / 10
A solo-developed guild-management tactics RPG that Steam's own reviewers keep comparing to Final Fantasy Tactics, Darkest Dungeon and Fire Emblem — deep, generous with content, and wrapped in an art style its own fans describe as looking like a 2000s Flash game.
7.8 / 10
A genuinely uncompromising survival RPG that refuses to make its hero special — beloved by fans who click with that philosophy, and undercut for years by a specific, still-recurring bug that deletes players' backpacks along with everything inside them.
6.5 / 10
A NZ$2.99 click-to-build island tycoon with no ads and no in-app purchases, whose entire Steam review history — five reviews, four positive — was written inside five weeks of its November 2023 launch and hasn't gained a single new one since.
5 / 10
A budget horde-survivor wearing Pathfinder's licensed skin over a thin, repetitive core that even its own most-upvoted positive review calls "meh out of 10" — and updates stopped seven weeks after launch.
4.5 / 10
Owlcat's debut CRPG launched in 2018 famously unfinished, and years of patches earned it a real redemption arc in its own reviews — only for a 2024 change of ownership to hand it a fresh publisher-trust problem that shows up plainly in this year's numbers.
7 / 10
Read review of Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition
Veslo Games' web-of-relays base defence owes an open debt to the Kongregate flash classic The Space Game, and for a handful of missions that inheritance is a genuine strength. Fifty-two achievements and a leaderboard have sat broken since the developer went quiet in 2018, and the sixteen-mission campaign runs out of new ideas well before it runs out of missions.
5.5 / 10
