T w e n t y S i d e d

I have realized that I need to change the way I think about “reviewing” games. For years my habit was to buy a AAA game, play through it a bunch of times, digest it, and then write thousands of words over the course of many weeks as I analyzed the experience in exhaustive detail. I didn’t always do that, but it was kind of the ideal. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that this writing style was completely at odds with my playing habits.

It used to be that I’d buy five or six big AAA games a year. I only played a few because they were so expensive, and I played them so deeply because I wanted to wring value out of them to justify the price tag. Damn it, I’m kinda tired of Deus Ex: Invisible War, but I can’t get another game until March so I might as well play through it again.

I don’t play games like that now. Games are cheaper. Games are shorter. I play more indies. I play more games casually, or in short bursts. I’m more picky, and less inclined to stick with a game when I stop having fun. I have gifts, review copies, and Steam sales dropping titles into my queue, so I’ve always got something promising over the horizon. Tomb Raider is the first game in ages where I consumed a game in an absolute sense, exhausting its possibilities and fully exploring it mechanically.

I’ve been clinging to my old review paradigm as I shifted to this new approach to playing games, and the result is that I rarely review games now. I’ve been stuck in this mindset where you can’t review a game unless you’ve beaten it. It’s a natural reaction to the fanboy lineup of defense against critical analysis:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Reviews: Now With More Shortness”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.