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 first-person solo-dev landlord sim whose overwhelming launch complaint — that the core loop was mostly sleeping to skip time — was rewritten by the developer in two patches shipped the very same day this review was researched.
5 / 10
A physics-driven co-op extraction horror that wears its Lethal Company debt openly and still carved out its own identity — helped, oddly, by a store banner so deliberately ugly that half its own reviews open by apologising for it.
7.5 / 10
A masterfully modernized remake of one of gaming's most influential horror games — briefly and seriously undermined in early 2026 by a new anti-piracy DRM that tanked performance on an already three-year-old game, until Capcom reversed it within a month.
8.5 / 10
A gorgeous, genre-blending horror-action sequel to Resident Evil 7 — beloved broadly, but facing a real, consistent identity debate from series fans who miss the tighter, scarier tone that came before it, plus a launch-week DRM performance problem that's echoed the franchise's reputation years later.
8 / 10
A deduction game that hands you a magic pocket watch, sixty deaths, and no other tools — and asks you to work out exactly who died how, in what order, and at whose hand, using nothing but observation and logic.
9 / 10
A free incremental built around filling concentric, spinning colour rings instead of the usual bar chart of numbers — genuinely huge in scope, openly derivative in structure, and popular enough to have accumulated over seven thousand English Steam reviews doing it.
7 / 10
A turn-based wizard roguelike so uncompromising that its most-earned achievement sits at 24.5% — and whose only real critics are the people who loved the last one.
8 / 10
A gas-station management sim where you're secretly aliens gathering intel on humanity — a great hook for a group of friends on a Friday night, let down by how little the alien half actually changes about restocking shelves and running a till.
6.5 / 10
A densely systemic bullet-heaven survivor-like that grew from a simple, focused Early Access hit into something several hundred-hour veterans now describe as buried under its own added complexity — alongside real, current complaints about difficulty balance and performance.
7 / 10
A 4-player co-op tactical roguelite shooter from the studio behind Black Mesa, whose jump from Early Access to "1.0" this week delivered almost exactly what one detailed reviewer predicted it would — one new map and a few new guns, not the broader AI, economy and content overhaul the developer's own Early Access roadmap had promised.
6 / 10
A NZ$5.99 frog who cuts grass on your desktop — 95.4% positive, fifteen updates in eighteen months, and negative reviews from players with three hundred hours in it.
7.5 / 10
A co-op drug-empire sim that turned into one of the biggest word-of-mouth hits of the past two years, built almost single-handedly and beloved for exactly the reasons Breaking Bad was — right up until the empire is built and there's nothing left to do with it.
8 / 10
A free scratch-card incremental with 91% positive reviews, median playtimes near 100 hours — and an achievement called "Reviewed" that 40% of its owners have unlocked. The engagement is real. So is the asterisk on the score.
6.5 / 10
A beautiful, genuinely novel pirate sandbox whose reviews split almost entirely on one axis — whether you can tolerate its unrestricted PvP and the community built around it — plus a real, press-covered 2026 community-safety controversy worth knowing about before you buy.
6.5 / 10
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 idle RPG's grandparent, still running seventeen years on and still launching new worlds every few weeks — with a comic-fantasy charm that holds up and an economy built entirely around the moment a fresh leaderboard makes spending feel urgent.
6.5 / 10
You move to Shenzhen, take a job building circuits, and read a manual you're expected to print out — and the most-upvoted negative review, at 905 votes, recommends it anyway.
8 / 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 solo-developed extraction RPG whose "Mixed" score understates a real design problem with its combat, and whose review section contains an unusual, specific pattern worth reporting plainly — at least two detailed reviews that read as substantively critical while marking the game recommended, explicitly out of sympathy for the developer.
5.5 / 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
