Everything we have filed since the desk started keeping timings properly. Each entry names the person who played it, gives the length of both passes, and ends with one of three verdicts. If a publisher supplied the copy, it says so in the entry.
Filter by genre below. Nothing is hidden from the archive when a verdict is unflattering — the point of keeping a log is that the misses stay visible alongside the hits.
Showing all 7 logs.
ExplorationMarged Ellis22 h, then 14 h
A cave system that rewards a bad memory
First pass · March
Twenty-two hours, mostly lost. The map fills in beautifully but the early hours withhold so much that I nearly stopped at the third locked door.
Second pass · July
Fourteen hours and far better for it. Knowing the shape of the place turns backtracking into a route. A May patch also fixed the map legend.
The second run was not simply faster, it was a different game — the sort you replay to admire the joinery rather than to reach the ending. Accessibility is patchy: the audio cue for a hidden passage has no visual twin, which a reader flagged and we have chased with the studio. Retail copy, bought by the desk.
Runs again
RhythmOsian Pryce19 h, then 6 h
Sixty tracks, and about nine of them stick
First pass · January
An immediate delight. The input window is generous, the visual clutter is low, and the difficulty curve is one of the gentlest I have played.
Second pass · May
The delight thinned. Once you have cleared the tracks you care about, the remaining fifty are structurally identical and the unlock order will not let you skip.
This is the kind of game our method exists for. On a single playthrough it looks like a straightforward recommendation; come back in the spring and the shortage of genuinely distinct charts is hard to ignore. Worth your time, not worth your year. Retail copy.
Runs once
SmallholdingFfion Doherty31 h, then 40 h
Where the seasons carry the story instead of the dialogue
First pass · February
Slow to open up. The first in-game year is largely admin, and the tutorial buries the two mechanics that later carry everything.
Second pass · June
Much stronger. Skipping the guided opening and planting on instinct produced the best forty hours anyone at this desk logged all season.
The lesson from the gap is that this game is badly served by its own introduction. If you have bounced off it before, a second attempt is a genuinely different experience — a strange thing to write in a recommendation, but there it is. Retail copy.
Runs again
Corridor shooterOsian Pryce13 h, then abandoned at 9 h
The set pieces hold; the twelve hours between them do not
First pass · December
Loud, confident, and paced well enough that the repetition passes unnoticed. Finished across a single weekend without complaint.
Second pass · April
Abandoned two-thirds of the way through by three of the five of us. Without the novelty of the opening, the middle act is a long grey walk.
We argued about this one for a fortnight. A game that is genuinely enjoyable once and unbearable twice is not a failure, but our scale forces the question of whether it earns a place in a limited amount of free time. This time the answer was no. Publisher-supplied copy.
Left unfinished
DetectiveMarged Ellis11 h, then 12 h
A mystery that survives knowing the answer
First pass · November
Tight, well-written, and mercifully free of the busywork that usually pads this genre. The notebook system does the deduction with you rather than for you.
Second pass · March
Slower, and better. Knowing the culprit turns every early conversation into a study of how the script hides its evidence in plain sight.
The rare case where the second pass took longer than the first. Two accessibility notes: subtitles are fully resizable with a speaker-name toggle, and there is no timed input anywhere in the game, which makes it one of the more approachable things we have logged. Retail copy.
Runs again
ManagementFfion Doherty27 h, then 8 h
A brilliant first thirty hours with no second act
First pass · October
Compulsive. The spreadsheet under the surface is legible, the failure states are informative rather than punishing, and the interface is genuinely well made.
Second pass · February
Eight hours before it became obvious that the optimal route never changes. The randomised events shuffle the order of problems, not their nature.
Nothing in this game is broken. It simply has one solution, and once you have found it there is no reason to look for another. That is a perfectly reasonable thing for a game to be, and it is exactly the information a single review cannot give you. Retail copy.
Runs once
ExplorationDilys Karan16 h, then abandoned at 3 h
An open valley with nothing under the scenery
First pass · September
Handsome and calm. The traversal feels good for about six hours, and the soundtrack does a great deal of quiet work.
Second pass · January
Three hours in I realised I was retracing a landscape I remembered perfectly and had nothing left to discover in. Stopped there and said so.
We considered filing this as Runs once, but the second attempt did not merely fade, it actively fell apart — and our scale is meant to describe what happened rather than to soften it. If you play it, play it once, slowly, and stop when the valley stops surprising you. Publisher-supplied copy.
Left unfinished
No entries in that genre yet. We only file after two passes, so some genres take a while to appear.
Something out of date?
Patches move faster than our gap
A verdict describes a game as it stood on the date of the second pass. If a later update has changed something material, tell us and we will either add a dated note to the entry or, where the change is large enough, run a third pass. Corrections are logged in public.
