Voices
Five people, two rented rooms, no advertising department
Joremalix started in the back half of a shared workspace on Colegate when two of us realised we had both quietly given up on a game we had recommended to other people six months earlier. The desk exists to stop that happening again.
None of us does this full time. Between the five of us there is a school technician, a bookkeeper, two part-time software testers and one person who repairs bicycles, which is why our output is measured in entries per season rather than posts per day. Every write-up carries the name of the person who played the game, and that person answers for it.
Who covers what
The desk
Marged Ellis
Founding editor · exploration, detective
Set up the desk after eleven years of keeping private notes on everything she finished, a habit that turned out to be the whole method. She writes the exploration and detective entries, chairs the comparison meetings, and is the person most likely to argue that a game deserved a harsher verdict than the room wanted to give it.
Plays mainly on the upstairs desktop, and reads her own first-pass notes only after the second pass is timed and closed.
Osian Pryce
Rhythm, corridor shooters
Came to the desk from a background in live sound, which shows in how much of his writing is about audio mixing, input latency and the exact moment a rhythm game stops being generous. He is also the person who most often abandons a second pass, and has become unfashionably comfortable with saying so in print.
Handles the timing discipline: every pass he runs is logged to the minute, including the parts spent stuck.
Ffion Doherty
Smallholding, management, builders
Writes about the games that are, in her phrase, mostly spreadsheets wearing a coat. She has the longest average playthrough at the desk and the most patience for a slow opening, which makes her verdicts on badly-introduced games unusually useful. She is also the reason our entries mention tutorials so often.
Runs most of her second passes on the handheld, and tracks whether an interface designed for a desk survives a smaller screen.
Dilys Karan
Open landscapes, accessibility pass
Joined in the second year and took over the accessibility checklist, which she rewrote from four items to six after readers pointed out what we had been missing. She is careful to describe rather than grade, on the grounds that she does not rely on most of the options she is testing and would rather be corrected than confidently wrong.
Also keeps the correction log, and is unusually cheerful about adding to it.
Tomas Brenner
Second reader, subtitles and text
Does not usually take the lead on an entry. Instead he plays the last two hours of every game we cover, cold, without having read the notes, which turns out to be a reliable way of catching a write-up that has drifted away from the thing it is describing. He also checks subtitle legibility on the living-room console at ordinary viewing distance.
Wrote the house rule that no entry may use a number, a star or a percentage anywhere in its text.
“We are five people with day jobs and a rule. The rule is the only thing about us that is unusual.”
Tomas BrennerThe gaps
What this desk does not cover
Every outlet has blind spots. Ours are large and we would rather list them than let you find out by reading a badly-judged entry. If your interests sit mostly in this list, we are probably not a useful site for you, and that is a reasonable thing for us to tell you on our own about page.
- Competitive shooters and team-based multiplayer. None of us plays at a level where our judgement would mean anything.
- Sports and racing simulations. Same reason, plus an annual release cycle that our three-month gap cannot handle.
- Live-service games. A game that redesigns itself every eight weeks makes a second pass a review of something else entirely.
- Horror. A simple matter of taste; nobody here enjoys it enough to be fair to it.
- Hardware reviews and performance benchmarking. We describe the three machines we own and nothing beyond them. See the yardstick page.
Independence
How the desk pays for itself
Joremalix has no advertising, no sponsored entries, no affiliate links and nothing for sale. The workspace is shared and the desk fee is split five ways. Games are either bought by whoever plays them or supplied by the publisher, and every entry states which. We accept the game and nothing else — no travel, no hardware, no early access in exchange for a publication date, which is easy for us to hold to given that we never publish inside three months of release.
If any of that ever changes, it will be written on this page before it appears anywhere else on the site.
Get in touch
One inbox, read by all five of us
There is no press contact and no separate corrections address. Everything arrives in the same place and someone answers it by hand, usually inside four working days.