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 genuinely well-regarded text-based interactive novel with real fans of its writing and world, undercut by an undisclosed cliffhanger ending — this is Book 1 of an unfinished series, a fact the store page doesn't state plainly — plus real grammar errors and a romance structure some players didn't sign up for.
6.4 / 10
A well-regarded VR escape room with genuinely clever puzzles, let down by real, specific motion-sickness reports from experienced VR players, a short three-room runtime, and a promised fourth room this review confirmed via the developer's own 2017 news post was never delivered.
5.4 / 10
A three-person GDevelop sequel about executing villagers and farming their souls, honest and unpretentious about what it is — but every one of its handful of Steam reviews so far is negative, and they converge on the same two complaints, an achievement curve that backs both up.
4.5 / 10
A solo-developer escape-room-style puzzle adventure through a mysterious woodland — logically satisfying puzzles wrapped in almost no story, a missing settings menu and a runtime most reviewers clock at under an hour.
5.5 / 10
A genuinely detailed, historically respectful dive into the Titanic wreck that even its critics praise for content and atmosphere — let down by control and interface problems severe and consistent enough to make it feel unfinished for non-VR and gamepad players.
5.3 / 10
A Kickstarter-backed spiritual successor to Planescape Torment that inherited its predecessor's greatest weakness (combat) more than its strength — checked directly against Planescape's own current numbers, the gap between "spiritual successor" and "successor" is stark.
6 / 10
A genuinely underused setting — WWI trench horror — with real atmosphere and sound design, undercut by a short, thin "collect the items while a monster hunts you" loop and a cluster of real performance bugs, despite years of continued developer support.
5 / 10
A procedurally generated VR orc-slaying co-op crawler with real fans and a fun weapon feel when it works — undermined by locomotion and hit-detection complaints that recur, unchanged, across seven years of reviews, and a controller-support gap that's never been patched for hardware that became mainstream after the developer stopped updating it.
4 / 10
A one-person tactical boxing sim where fighters age, get hurt and can genuinely die — built by a boxer, for boxing fans, with a real perk system underneath a genuinely rough interface and a review sample so small that this covers all eleven of it.
6.5 / 10
A genuinely ambitious 2011 open-world fantasy RPG wrapped around one of PC gaming's most notorious publisher track records — phone-activation DRM demanding personal information, retroactively injected microtransactions, and an account requirement reviewers report is still being newly enforced on decade-old purchases in 2026.
4.5 / 10
Obsidian's "evil already won" isometric RPG opens with one of the most original premises in the genre — and then, according to a large share of its own fans, simply stops rather than ends, a truncation reviewers link directly to the sequel and expansions it never got.
7 / 10
A cheap, thin desktop-wallpaper colony builder with a review sample too small to trust on its own — but three separate negative reviews independently describe the game running unexpectedly in the background after being closed, a real and specific risk for Steam's own 2-hour refund window.
3 / 10
Read review of Underwater World - Idle Desktop Colony Building Simulator
A solo-developer campus-management sim with an unusually specific pitch — schedule real courses and sections, build dorms, hire professors, chase reputation — undercut by a launch-week save bug, support that appears to have stopped within days of release, and Steam's own achievement data showing almost nobody gets past the opening hour.
4.6 / 10
Read review of University Tycoon - The College Management Simulator
A voxel-art city builder that trades money and disasters for a strict web of building adjacency rules, turning city planning into a genuine spatial puzzle — Very Positive on Steam, with a persistent, well-documented complaint that its achievement-gated progression can trap players on the first map for good.
7.2 / 10
Nine years, a fired writer, a dropped studio and one troubled development later, Bloodlines 2 shipped as an action-adventure closer to Dishonored than an RPG — and its own most-upvoted review, at over 10,000 votes, says the original team "deserved better than this."
5 / 10
A cheap, chapter-based choose-your-own-adventure through an alternate 1888 British Empire from a developer better known for jigsaw puzzles — genuinely witty in places, undercut by a missing save system and a colonial-frontier premise played disappointingly straight.
5.5 / 10
A hand-drawn point-and-click comedy about a laid-off boar's quest to become Emperor of an alternate-history Austria-Hungary — genuinely funny and gorgeous to look at, undone for a vocal minority by one hated minigame and a grindy achievement list.
7 / 10
A twin-stick shooter welded to an idle tycoon, told through a space-capitalism gag that outlasts most of the systems built to support it.
6.3 / 10
A widely loved Left 4 Dead-style co-op action RPG whose own longtime fans describe a recurring pattern of the developer breaking what worked — most seriously with a kernel-level anti-cheat system reviewers say has issued false-positive bans in a purely cooperative game.
7 / 10
A card-based Cultist Simulator-inspired alchemy sim that genre fans on both sides of the aggregate respect, undercut by a real mid-game grind wall, real save-corruption bugs, and offset by unusually active, near-weekly developer patching since launch.
6.5 / 10
A free 2018 AdVenture Capitalist-style clicker dressed up in cowboy hats, with a genuinely playable free loop, a reset curve that stretches from minutes to days, and an achievement list that expects you to recruit 80-plus strangers to friend you.
5.5 / 10
A faithful, historically significant remake of the 1981 game that founded the dungeon-crawler RPG genre — undermined by character-corrupting bugs its developer stopped patching over two years ago.
5.5 / 10
Read review of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord
Talentless Person Games' pocket-sized clicker sends you smashing other planets apart to rebuild the home you lost, over a LoFi soundtrack and a run that's done in about an hour. It's a pleasant enough hour for the asking price, but "survival" in the title oversells a game with no hunger, health or threat system anywhere in it.
5.5 / 10
A cheap, streamlined tactics spinoff that's held up reasonably well on its own mechanical terms for six years — until a company-wide Take-Two/2K Terms of Service change in 2025 dragged its recent review sentiment down over data collection and modding restrictions that have nothing to do with the game itself.
6 / 10
