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 pixel-art farming and life-sim RPG that spent two years in Early Access proving it isn't just another Stardew Valley clone — jumping, real combat, D&D nights at the tavern, and writing sharp enough to win over players who'd sworn off the genre — reviewed on the eve of its 1.0 launch with 97.7% of nearly 30,000 reviews already behind it.
8 / 10
The gather-craft-expand loop that launched a hundred imitators, and one of the most effective opening hours in any game of its type. It's also been abandoned since 2020 with a promised multiplayer mode that never arrived — and it still sells at full price.
6.5 / 10
Playground Games' open-world racer remains Very Positive across nearly 279,000 Steam reviews nearly five years after release, still receiving weekly content updates today — undercut by a real, specific, dateable complaint that Playground introduced paid car-pack microtransactions roughly two years after launch despite Premium and Ultimate edition buyers having already paid for a "car pass" that was marketed as covering exactly this content.
7 / 10
11 bit studios' sequel trades the original Frostpunk's intimate, one-building-at-a-time survival for a zoomed-out, district-based political simulation set 30 years later — a deliberate redesign that draws Mostly Positive reception on its own terms, but recurs across a remarkably consistent share of longtime fans as having lost the emotional, personal intimacy that made the original a genre-defining classic.
7 / 10
A genuinely well-realised Westeros action RPG — strong voice acting, a story that respects its source lore, and combat reviewers compare favourably to Assassin's Creed Odyssey — buried under monetisation so aggressive that a meaningful majority of even sympathetic reviewers describe it as the single thing actively ruining the game, right down to a pay-to-revive prompt at the moment of death.
5.5 / 10
Tango Gameworks' supernatural open-world action game remains Very Positive across more than 20,000 Steam reviews for its genuinely striking, densely realised recreation of Tokyo — undercut by a real, remarkably consistent "beautiful but repetitive" complaint about its combat and side content, and by a specific, unusual, dateable controversy this review can confirm directly: Bethesda added Denuvo DRM to the game roughly a year after launch, bundled inside what its own update was billed as free content.
6.5 / 10
A medieval MMORPG that died with its studio in 2023 and came back free-to-play in June 2026 under new owners. The three-nation war it's built on is still the best thing about it — and six weeks after the relaunch, its most loyal players are documenting cheats rather than sieges.
6 / 10
A faithful, expanded rebuild of one of open-world RPG history's most influential games — the 2001 original that reviewers credit as a direct forerunner to The Witcher — that returned to the Colony to Very Positive reception and 500,000 copies sold, undercut at launch by genuine, severe bugs and softlocks that the developer has since addressed through a rapid, transparent patch cadence.
8 / 10
A medieval cemetery sim with a tech tree the size of a small factory game and a sense of humour about corpse disposal. Also the only game I've reviewed where a player says they finished it out of hatred — and where the community's fix is a mod list that removes the walking.
6.5 / 10
The Dealer returns, and this time he's dealing cards over a bullet heaven. The card layer is the most interesting thing in the genre right now; the horde layer underneath it hasn't worked out how to make you feel powerful yet — and the deckbuilding in its own tagline is still on the roadmap.
6.5 / 10
The best co-op shooter of its generation and one of the most argued-about games on Steam. Its top negative review has thirty-four thousand helpful votes, its second has twenty-two thousand, and neither is about the shooting — which is superb.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely distinctive, hardcore 100-player WWII shooter built around resource-based meta-strategy and a dynamically shifting front line, still Very Positive across nearly 150,000 Steam reviews five years on — undercut by a real, sustained, multi-year complaint that Team17's 2023 acquisition of the game brought a persistent decline in update quality, and a genuine, currently active cheating problem several reviewers describe as severe enough to have driven entire dedicated communities away.
6.5 / 10
Dante is a girl, Hell is a bullet heaven, and the deck-building actually works. The most beautiful thing in the genre right now runs into a difficulty wall at the second circle that has stopped six players in seven — and the studio is patching it weekly.
7.5 / 10
An Earthbound-flavoured turn-based RPG about a socially anxious old man, his truffle-pig best friend, and a corporate conspiracy involving giant mushrooms — built around a genuinely novel idea where awkward conversations function as real combat encounters, and near-unanimously loved by the players who've played it.
8.5 / 10
Tango Gameworks' rhythm-action surprise remains Overwhelmingly Positive across nearly 36,000 Steam reviews, widely regarded as one of the finest games Xbox has published in a decade — a reputation shadowed by a genuinely poignant, fully documented history this review can confirm in
9 / 10
hololive's first official mobile game pairs a genuinely solid rhythm engine and a surprisingly deep theme-park builder with a fair, transparent gacha economy — then ships a Steam port with kernel-level anti-cheat and keyboard controls that never should have left the touchscreen.
7 / 10
One entry in a whole shelf of near-identical cheap idle RPGs from the same solo developer, with genuine long-term depth for players who push through — and a first hour so poorly explained that one reviewer called it "the easiest refund of my life."
5.5 / 10
A free-to-play multiplayer idle RPG built openly in RuneScape and Melvor Idle's image, adding a genuine social and clan layer those single-player idlers don't have — undercut by paywalled skills, expensive cosmetics, and an "idle" framing that some players say demands more constant attention than it should.
7 / 10
A fruit-merging incremental that wears its debt to Gnorp Apologue openly and executes the formula well enough to earn Very Positive reviews, undercut mainly by a name that promises more hands-off progress than the game is actually willing to give.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed, node-based automation game that scratches the Factorio itch without Factorio's build-everything-yourself demands, still in Early Access two and a half years in and still being actively rebalanced — most recently to remove the exact progression walls its players have been complaining about since launch.
6 / 10
Hazelight Studios' GAME OF THE YEAR-winning co-op adventure remains one of gaming's most celebrated couch-co-op experiences, Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 266,000 Steam reviews and independently confirmed to have sold over 23 million copies — undercut for a real, recurring minority of players by a genuinely dark, forced late-game "torture" sequence, and by online connectivity friction this review can confirm was substantially, though not entirely, fixed by a documented May 2024 update removing the mandatory EA Launcher requirement.
8 / 10
A solo developer's three-years-in-the-making cosmic-horror action roguelite that draws passionate praise for its atmosphere and combat feel, while a consistent thread of its own fans worry it's chasing Dead Cells a little too directly to fully stand on its own.
7 / 10
The Fox Knocks follows up their mining incremental Kin and Quarry with a tighter, faster hybrid — Vampire Survivors-style bullet-heaven combat wrapped around a genuine incremental gear economy — and lands it well enough on day one that the loudest complaint is simply wanting more of it.
7 / 10
A competent, familiar entry in a fifteen-year-old tower defense franchise that still lands well with newcomers, while a genuine and specific chorus of long-time fans call it the weakest Kingdom Rush yet — too short at full price, too reliant on paid campaign DLC, and too close to a decade of prior instalments to feel like real evolution.
6.5 / 10
