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 free high-school rom-com visual novel that lets you play the romance or play the matchmaker, fully voiced in three languages, with nothing behind a paywall — the third clean release in a row from a studio that has quietly earned the right to be trusted on that point.
7 / 10
A one-developer desktop pet that evolves from a slime into a dark sorceress and is allowed to shake your windows and flash your taskbar along the way — reviewed on its Early Access launch day, with zero user reviews yet to check it against and an achievement sample so small it can be read as a raw account count.
6 / 10
A one-million-word ChoiceScript interactive novel about a shipwrecked clan finding a new home, nine years in public development before its Steam launch, with one of its two writers carrying a genuinely Very Positive track record on the same imprint and zero independent reviews yet to confirm anything else.
7 / 10
A budget co-op horror extraction game about looting a haunted graveyard from a flying pirate ship, filed under "Massively Multiplayer" on Steam despite capping every session at six friends with no public lobby browser — a genre tag its own launch-day reviewers are already pointing out doesn't hold up.
5 / 10
A 3v3 auto-battle collector RPG about assembling a squad from 100 possible Dmon, each with a three-stat build, a four-part skill kit and its own leveled equipment — you draft the team, then watch it fight on its own across a hex-tile map.
6.5 / 10
A side-scrolling farming sim that spent roughly fifteen months in Early Access before its 5 August 2026 graduation to 1.0, pairing Stardew-style crop and relationship systems with vertical platform building, gene-splicing crops, and bullet-hell drone combat against the ruins of a collapsed world.
8.2 / 10
A grid-free tactical auto-battler where a debut studio builds its progression entirely around unlocking a permanent roster of up to 40 voxel heroes across 90-plus numbered challenges — a real meta-progression system wearing a much busier genre label than its mechanics actually earn, checked against a launch weekend with zero player-count evidence either way.
6.5 / 10
Real chess rules underneath a board that fights back — pieces carry hit points and their own fog-of-war vision, captures aren't guaranteed kills, and a mid-turn real-time window lets you burn a cooldown spell before the clock passes to your opponent. Two days into Early Access it already has a working single-player mode against AI, up to four-player online lobbies, and eight patches.
7 / 10
A solo-developer debut sending a knight through a procedural, room-by-room dungeon toward Room 100, with a permanent meta-shop and run-only merchant cards layered on top. Six days into a year-long Early Access plan, with zero outside voices yet to confirm any of it.
4.5 / 10
A day-old precision speedrunner that makes you spend your own health bar as a resource — slow time, cut down enemies mid-air, and burn "Echoes" for shortcuts and boosts across fifteen handcrafted courses, each chasing a five-rung Bronze-through-Par medal ladder.
7 / 10
A solo-built voxel colony sim where every species of tree and vein of ore keeps its own look all the way into the furniture you craft from it, three and a half years out of Early Access at NZ$38.49 with no user reviews yet against the 1.0 build.
6.5 / 10
A two-day-old two-player co-op puzzle platformer built entirely around a single mechanic — shooting a laser from your own eye to push or pull your partner through obstacles neither of you could clear alone — priced at NZ$2.39 with zero user reviews and zero recorded concurrent players at the time of checking.
6 / 10
A hand-drawn metroidvania about umbrella combat, talent-show boss fights and an in-game social network, reviewed on launch day — six years after it was first announced as a very different game on a very different platform.
6.5 / 10
A text-based football world generator where you don't pick a lineup or call a tactic — you only approve or reject the transfers clubs propose, then watch decades of invented history unfold. A genuinely different angle on football management, launched with a five-review Steam page and some sharp early complaints about its own core promise.
7 / 10
A solo-developed BL suspense visual novel about cannibalism, class and a very literal kind of appetite, two days into Early Access with zero Steam reviews yet — reviewed on the developer's own Early Access FAQ, patch history and a genuinely positive 18-month demo record.
6.5 / 10
A first-person precision platformer that repackages the free Source-engine movement scene — surf, bhop and climb, born in Half-Life and Counter-Strike 1.6 mods — as a standalone Steam release with themed maps, Steam Achievements and leaderboards to chase. Released 6 August 2026 with no user-review corpus yet to weigh it against.
6 / 10
A real-time roguelike dungeon crawl where the resource system is a Picross grid — solve Nonogram puzzles fast enough and correctly enough to charge the energy that fuels every attack, shield and finisher.
7 / 10
A NZ$1.43 pixel-art clicker about tapping a gold bar, buying pickaxes and mine carts across six palette-swapped regions, and running two short bonus minigames — checked a week after launch, with no prestige loop found anywhere in its own achievement list.
5 / 10
A solo-developed roguelike from Istanbul that turns career survival into a weekly trading floor — clear your student debt or get walked out, across three branching story threads and nine endings, for a one-time NZ$9.99.
7 / 10
A one-mechanic precision platformer where the character only falls and the player's entire job is choosing which way is down, wrapped in a 78-achievement completion ladder and a minimalist green wireframe look, released day-one with no review corpus yet to check it against.
6 / 10
A NZ$1.46 one-person idle business tycoon with a real prestige tree and an inflation mechanic that actually works as advertised — undercut by a save system that can eat hours of progress and a developer who stopped patching two days after launch.
5.5 / 10
A dark fantasy deckbuilding roguelike wrapped around a guild-management hub — recruit from ten heroes, send a three-person party into the abyss with permadeath on the line, and spend what they bring back on facilities that keep the next run alive.
7 / 10
Ars Goetia's solo-developed sequel adds first-person combat, a real-time-seconds twist on turn-based fighting and a forged-not-found loot system to the original Hellslave formula. Three days after launch it is loved in English and considerably more divided in the Simplified Chinese corpus that makes up nearly half its reviews, for a reason the developer had already half-fixed by the time this was written.
7 / 10
A tactical tower defense from solo developer Tearevo built around one flying fortress under siege from every direction — a hex-grid network of turrets, resource collectors and support modules, split between grounded sieges and scrolling air battles, with a roguelite boost draw and a between-mission tech tree layered on top.
7 / 10
