Minor Titles Quarterly
Small games, examined closely
Method
Playthrough conditions
Minor Titles Quarterly
Small games, examined closely
Reviews here make claims about playtime, structure and finish. Since one person made every one of those observations, the conditions under which they were made ought to be on the record. What follows is the procedure and its limitations.
By searching storefronts for recent releases with almost no reviews, by following the release pages of very small teams, and by looking at what nobody has written about. There is no submission route, so nothing arrives because a developer wanted it to.
A game becomes a candidate if it appears to have been finished rather than abandoned. Early access releases, prototypes and demos are excluded, because a review of something unfinished is a review of an intention.
Default settings unless a game's structure depends on another option, in which case the review names the setting used. No guides are consulted during play, and where I became stuck the time spent stuck is included in the playtime figure, because a player would experience it.
| Condition | Practice here |
|---|---|
| Acquisition | Bought at retail price |
| Difficulty | Default unless stated |
| Guides | Not consulted during play |
| Mods | Never installed |
| Hardware | Ordinary consumer machine |
The time it took me to reach a natural stopping point, which for most of these games is the end and for a few is the moment the game stops offering anything new. It is not a completion figure and it is not a recommendation about how long a game should take.
Figures are rounded to the nearest hour, or the nearest ten minutes for games under an hour. Where I replayed a game, the review says so and the figure refers to the first playthrough.
Because the interesting claims about a four-hour game with one mechanic cannot survive compression into a number. A score would also invite comparison with games reviewed elsewhere on entirely different terms, which is the opposite of what this publication is for.
Each review closes with a short passage headed where this leaves it, which states plainly what I think and what qualifies it. That is the whole verdict.
Reviews describe structure, including endings, where the ending is the point under discussion. Games this short cannot be discussed usefully otherwise. No internal warnings are given.
Scores, storefront links, purchase advice, news, previews, interviews, patch coverage and release-day reviews. A review published here is a description of a completed experience rather than a buying guide, and there is no route from this site to a shop.
Sample of one player. My tolerance for slow interfaces varies with the hour, my judgement about whether a game is finished is a judgement, and I cannot know anything about how these games were made beyond what the finished work shows. Where a review infers a production constraint, that is an inference and is written as one.
Errors about what a game contains are corrected in place with a note. Playtimes are corrected if miscounted. Where a patch changes a game after publication, the review stands as a record of what it was, with a note describing the change if the change is substantial.