Method
Four strands, because five people cannot credibly cover everything
Most sites decide what to write about by asking what is popular this week. We decided it in advance and then stopped arguing. Each strand belongs to whoever has the ear for it, rotates on a fixed cycle, and comes with its own idea of what a fair reading looks like.
Tactics
Turn-based and real-time strategy, skirmish games, anything where the interesting decision happens before the action does. We read these slowly and we lose deliberately, because a tactics game only shows its shape once you have failed inside it several times.
Hours floor: twenty-five. Below that, tactical systems have not finished revealing themselves.
Narrative
Story-led games of any length, including ones where the story is told through a building rather than a person. The test here is whether the writing survives a second pass once you know where it is going.
Hours floor: completion, or twelve hours, whichever comes first.
Puzzle
Mechanism games, logic boxes, environmental puzzles. Every write-up in this strand gets finished — we will not publish on a puzzle game we abandoned, because the back third is usually where the design either justifies itself or does not.
Hours floor: whatever completion takes, plus a partial second run.
Survival
Resource management, exploration under pressure, weather and hunger and distance. The longest hours in the archive live here, because these games routinely spend ten hours being tedious before becoming remarkable.
Hours floor: twenty, and no write-up published before the second in-game season.
The rotation
What goes up when
Published every Thursday. If a write-up is not ready, the slot stays empty rather than being filled with something thinner — that has happened twice and will happen again.
| Week | Strand | Held by | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 July | Tactics | Aoife Brennan | Posted |
| 6 August | Narrative | Dev Raichura | In edit, two readers assigned |
| 13 August | Puzzle | Marta Kowalczyk | Playing, 14 hours logged |
| 20 August | Survival | Callum Etherington | Not started |
| 27 August | Tactics | Unassigned | Open to requests |
| 3 September | Narrative | Priya Sandhu | Game chosen, not announced |
The hardware we play on
Four machines, none of them impressive
We test on ordinary equipment on purpose. A write-up that only holds true on a machine most readers do not own is not much use to anyone.
| Machine | Roughly | Used for | Display |
|---|---|---|---|
| The tower | Mid-range desktop, four years old | Everything first. If it struggles here, that goes in the piece. | 1440p, 60Hz |
| The laptop | Thin-and-light, integrated graphics | Checking whether a game is playable without a dedicated card | 1080p, 60Hz |
| The handheld | Small-screen portable | Text legibility and control remapping tests | 800p, 7 inch |
| The old box | Eight-year-old desktop kept alive out of spite | The floor. Anything running here runs anywhere. | 1080p, 60Hz |
Accessibility notes
The seven things we check on every game
Checked against the shipped build rather than the press materials, and listed as absent when they are absent. This section of a write-up is never cut for length.
Text and subtitles
Can subtitles be resized, given a background, and attributed to a speaker. Fixed-size text is noted as a barrier, not a preference.
Colour reliance
Whether any required information is carried by colour alone, and whether an alternative cue exists. We have failed games on this that were otherwise excellent.
Control remapping
Full remapping, partial, or none. Whether held inputs can be toggled instead, which matters more than most publishers seem to think.
Pause behaviour
Whether the game can be paused everywhere, including cutscenes and travel. Games that cannot be interrupted exclude a lot of people.
Motion and camera
Field of view, camera shake, motion blur, and whether each can be turned off independently rather than bundled into one blunt toggle.
Audio cues
Whether anything essential is signalled by sound with no visual equivalent, and how separate the volume channels are.
Difficulty and assistance
What can be adjusted mid-run, whether adjusting it locks anything away, and how honestly the game labels its own options.
And what we do with it
Findings sit in a fixed block near the end of every write-up. If a game does badly here we say so in the opening paragraph as well, because burying it at the bottom would be a small dishonesty.
Questions we get asked
The five that come up most
Because a number gets quoted and the paragraph around it does not. We ran scores for our first two months and watched every discussion collapse into arguing about whether something was a seven or an eight. Removing the number roughly doubled the length of the writing, which tells you what the number was doing.
Yes, and every write-up says so in its first line when that is the case. Around a third of the archive was covered on lent copies. We do not accept travel, accommodation, hardware, or paid placements of any kind, and we have never run an advertisement.
Five people, all with other work, and an hours floor that makes anything faster dishonest. A second piece a week would mean halving the playing time, and the playing time is the only thing here that cannot be shortened without changing what the site is.
Please do, through the letters page. Suggestions that fit an existing strand and are not currently being covered elsewhere have a decent chance. We turn down most of them, usually because nobody here has the background to write about that genre without embarrassing themselves.
Factual errors are corrected within two working days and logged on the letters page with the date the correction arrived and who sent it, unless they asked to stay anonymous. Judgements we later disagree with get a dated note at the top of the original piece; the original text stays.