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 village-and-heroes RPG from the Punch Club and Graveyard Keeper studios that markets itself as idle and plays like a part-time job — genuinely funny writing and strong art undercut by a loop that never lets go of the mouse.
5.5 / 10
A shipwrecked hero levels up by winning minigames, not by clicking through menus. SoulGame Studio's sequel to its cult flash hit turns stat training into the whole game, and that idea is both the best and most exhausting thing about it.
7.5 / 10
An automation game that skips the usual pretend-programming abstractions and just hands you a Python-shaped scripting language, then asks you to actually write the loops and functions that run your farm. The rare "learn to code" game that works as a game first.
8.5 / 10
A build-crafting incremental about small creatures smashing a rock for wealth, where the usual "number always goes up" comfort is replaced by permanent choices that can genuinely sabotage a run.
8 / 10
Nineteen years old and still the only MMO that treats Tolkien's geography and timeline as a design constraint rather than a skin. Reviewed with Kingdoms of Harad current, asking what that licence discipline actually buys a player in 2026 — and what a new one genuinely has to pay to see it.
7 / 10
A free browser incremental whose entire subject is the prestige mechanic other incrementals treat as scaffolding — thirty-one reset layers stacked on top of each other, and the accidental parent of a modding framework that a very long tail of hobbyist developers have since built their own games on.
7 / 10
A tap-a-floor idle tower climber wrapped in Chinese mythology, with a genuinely tactile summon-and-collide combat loop undercut by a real-money marketplace that sells stat-buffing skins and a tutorial that explains almost nothing.
5.5 / 10
Proton Studio put a first-person gun in the clicker genre's most abstract hand, turning "tap the cookie" into "shoot the cube wall." The framing genuinely changes the opening hours, but the studio moved on to two spiritual successors years ago and hasn't touched this one since a December 2021 holiday event.
6 / 10
A solo developer's follow-up to Magic Archery swaps archery for architecture, building an incremental around growing a single wizard's tower toward a definite, well-earned ending rather than an infinite number-go-up treadmill.
8 / 10
A tactical fantasy RPG where you never actually give a combat order — you write a standing set of instructions for each unit and then watch your army carry them out, which makes it one of the closest things a big-budget console release has come to an automation game.
8 / 10
A solo developer's debut that welds an automated turret to a twin-stick Asteroids clone, then closes the whole arc out in an afternoon — a sharp, cheap hook let down by a mouse-hostile upgrade screen and a progression curve that peaks right as the credits roll.
7 / 10
A survival-crafting game with action-RPG combat and a boss list instead of a tech tree, built around a PvP fantasy that most of its players quietly opt out of. Two years past 1.0, with the studio now calling it content-complete, it's worth being precise about which version of this game you're actually signing up for.
8 / 10
A god-game sandbox where civilizations of humans, orcs, elves and dwarves grow, fight and collapse almost entirely on their own while you throw lightning, plagues and dragons at them. Nearly five years into Steam Early Access, it's still one of the most purely enjoyable toyboxes in PC gaming — as long as you never expected it to have an ending.
8 / 10
Reviewed with Midnight, the eleventh expansion, current and Season 2 landing this month. A look at what a subscriber actually gets in 2026 — the onboarding path, the sub-plus-shop-plus- expansion cost stack, and whether two decades of accumulated systems still add up to a game worth the monthly fee.
7.5 / 10
Kuro Games' answer to Genshin Impact swaps careful elemental chemistry for a faster, parry-driven combo system and a stamina-free traversal kit — and two years of patches have turned a rocky, heavily-criticised launch into one of Steam's best-reviewed live-service action RPGs. The question this review actually answers is what that trade costs you.
7.5 / 10
A Tamagotchi-raising sim welded onto an idle RPG, charming in exactly the way its premise promises and shallow in exactly the way that premise risks — the hero grows on its own, but you rarely get to decide how.
7.5 / 10
HoYoverse's third live-service RPG throws out the open world entirely and bets everything on combat — parries, dodge counters and three-character chain attacks that reward real execution rather than a stat sheet. The review is about whether that trade is worth what the mission structure and the story pacing cost you.
7.5 / 10
Berzerk Studio's villain-side clicker put you in charge of a Necromancer razing a fantasy kingdom instead of the other way around, and its gross-out humour and monster art still land. What doesn't hold up in 2026 is everything else — the studio confirmed six years ago that Zombidle would never be updated again, and Google Play has since dropped it.
5.5 / 10
A post-apocalyptic colony sim where the city is a physics object first and a spreadsheet second — every beam, platform and tower obeys weight and tension, and the rising and falling tide can take a whole district down with it.
7 / 10
LINE Games' cartoon-animal idle RPG nails the cute, low-friction auto-battle loop the genre runs on, but a currency pile-up and IAP tiers stretching past a hundred dollars keep it from standing out in a market this crowded.
6 / 10
Flyway Games turns a thirty-second countdown into a health bar, a currency and a weapon at once — a review of how far the time-freeze mechanic carries a roguelite built entirely around never letting the clock feel like punishment, and where cluttered onboarding and a softening difficulty curve hold it back.
8 / 10
Timberline Studio's cozy chef sim ties its farming-and-cooking loop directly into a trick-taking deckbuilder — a review of whether feeding your adventurers is a real tactical decision or just a chore standing between you and the next card fight.
8 / 10
Andrew Gower's post-RuneScape MMO is a genuinely inventive skilling game trapped inside a world that emptied out within weeks of launch, and twenty months of steady patches still haven't fixed either problem.
6 / 10
A solo-developed idle aquarium game that nails the cozy, screensaver-adjacent fantasy of collecting fish, but leans so hard on one buy-raise-sell loop that its rarest rewards become a months-long grind with nothing else underneath to fall back on.
7 / 10
