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.
An ambitious, Banished-inspired survival city-builder with genuinely deep production chains, weighed down by persistent balance problems, a currently game-breaking macOS bug, and rumours of developer abandonment the studio has publicly and directly denied.
6 / 10
Widely considered the best of Harebrained Schemes' three Shadowrun tactical RPGs — richer writing, a real home base to return to, characters worth following — undercut for a meaningful number of players by a long-standing soft-lock bug near the campaign's end that this review can't recommend around.
7.5 / 10
The third and final Harebrained Schemes Shadowrun tactical RPG, and the trilogy's most divisive entry — some players call it a masterpiece with a thousand-plus hours to back it up, others say the Matrix hacking minigame and murky pacing undo what Dragonfall got right.
6.5 / 10
The Kickstarter campaign that brought cyberpunk-meets-fantasy Shadowrun back to video games — a genuinely well-written tactical RPG that its own developer, and most of its fans, would go on to surpass twice over with the sequels it made possible.
6.5 / 10
The definitive modern Civilization for most players, thanks to two expansions that meaningfully deepened its district-and-diplomacy foundation — carrying an old, now-dated controversy over a data-collection policy update, and a genre-standard but real DLC bill for anyone chasing the complete roster.
8 / 10
A retro survival horror game that wears its Resident Evil and Silent Hill influences openly and still manages real originality — beloved for its atmosphere, queer storytelling and puzzle design, with one honest recurring complaint about how tedious that puzzle design gets.
8.5 / 10
A minimalist dice-based roguelike tactics game, originally built on itch.io, that's earned near-unanimous acclaim on Steam — with an unusually small negative-review pool centred on pacing and content depth rather than any fundamental design flaw.
8.5 / 10
A well-liked sci-fi gacha shooter with unusually generous pull rates is in the middle of a live revolt after a content-moderation pass altered or removed material a large number of players had already paid for, with no compensation offered.
5 / 10
A relentlessly demanding, meditative off-road trucking sim that reviewers describe with genuine reverence and dark humor in equal measure — undercut for years by unreliable multiplayer and crossplay stability, and an extensive DLC roster reviewers say pushes toward $200 for the full experience.
7 / 10
A philosophical sci-fi horror game about consciousness, identity and what survives an underwater apocalypse — nine years on, still Overwhelmingly Positive, and still honestly criticized by a consistent minority for gameplay that some feel gets in the story's way.
9 / 10
Endnight's sequel to The Forest is the best-looking survival-horror island you can build a base on, and its rockiest reviews — mostly written in the first weeks after launch — argued a beautiful map was hiding surprisingly little to actually do. Recent sentiment suggests the gap between the two has narrowed since.
7.5 / 10
A five-day-old Early Access boomer-shooter roguelite from a solo developer, blending Ultrakill-style movement combat with Risk of Rain-style item stacking and a boss roster drawn from world mythology — an unusually strong Early Access opening, read here as exactly that rather than a finished verdict.
7.5 / 10
A decade-old 4X space strategy game beloved enough to produce reviewers with 2,000+ hours logged — and, since 2024, a wave of those exact same veteran players turning against Paradox over DLC pricing, a specific performance regression, and player-reported AI-generated content.
7 / 10
A solo developer's entry into the Vampire Survivors mould gives its weapons a personality of their own, and arrives with a genuinely large unlock list for a two-day-old free release — the question this first look can't yet answer is how it plays at hour twenty.
6.5 / 10
The cult-classic CRPG built on a genuinely radical idea — that ending up in combat means your character build or your dialogue choices already failed — and a decade later, still the purest expression of a philosophy most of its own genre never dared attempt.
7 / 10
A visually stunning Dead Space spiritual successor that never fully recovered from a disastrous December 2022 performance launch — and whose save-corruption bugs, reported by reviewers three years apart, still haven't been fully resolved.
5.5 / 10
A terraforming survival-crafting game that turns a barren world into a breathable one in front of your eyes — beloved for exactly that transformation, and honestly criticized by a consistent minority for being addictive without offering much real friction or danger.
8 / 10
A Korean-myth action RPG built around a genuinely interesting idea — no levels, just relics, unique weapons and eighty tragic bosses — arrives with no PC graphics options, weak Metacritic scores on both platforms, and a pre-launch AI-art controversy the director says is fixed and plenty of players say they can still see.
4.5 / 10
A solo-developed love letter to Skyrim, West of Loathing and Supraland that reviewers consistently say nails its first two hours — and just as consistently say runs out of ideas, and occasionally soft-locks, well before the credits.
6.5 / 10
A free-to-play underwater submarine MMO explicitly chasing the nostalgia of 2000s browser PvP games like DarkOrbit and Deepolis, with genuine strategic clan warfare underneath — undercut on day one by a monetisation model reviewers describe, overwhelmingly and specifically, as pay-to-win.
5 / 10
The trilogy-capping mega-campaign Total War fans waited years for finally arrived and is genuinely excellent — after a rough launch, an expensive DLC structure, and a 2023 forum moderation policy that told players criticism was "a privilege" rather than a right.
6.5 / 10
An open-world sci-fi gacha ARPG with real exploration and character-design appeal, whose review score is being shaped less by its combat or its shop than by an account-migration process that a large, consistent share of returning players say permanently deleted hundreds of hours and real money without adequate warning.
5 / 10
A decade-old free-to-play MMORPG with an extraordinarily dedicated hardcore playerbase — reviewers with 2,000, 3,000, even 4,000 hours logged — and a 2026 sentiment collapse tied to a specific new complaint: classes that used to be earned through play are now gated behind gacha.
5.5 / 10
The spiritual successor to Theme Hospital that launched rough — pathing bugs, a missing copy-paste room button, repetitive late-game hospitals — and, unusually for this library, has visibly improved rather than declined as measured by its own negative-review volume over time.
8 / 10
