The archive

Long-form reviews, written after the credits roll.

Every review on this page is written after the writer has finished the game. We don't run impressions as verdicts. Numerical scores are personal recommendations from the individual writer, not editorial decrees.

RPG · Open World · 14 min read · Reviewed by Marin Vask

Hollow Citadel rewires the open-world formula

9.1 / 10

Hollow Citadel does the bravest thing an open-world RPG can do in 2025: it refuses to put a marker on your map. There is no quest log icon hovering over your destination, no glowing trail of breadcrumbs, no minimap arrow nudging you northeast. Instead, characters tell you where to go — by landmark, by direction, by reference to things you'll only recognise once you've spent twenty hours getting lost in the world. And it works. For about the first six hours I was annoyed. By hour fifteen I was reading conversations like a 13th-century pilgrim consults a road book, and the world had become more legible than any waypoint had ever made it.

The combat is fine. The story is good. The faction politics are excellent in the way that only a studio with a real lead writer can produce. But the thing I'll remember about this game, a year from now, is the silence on the map. We've forgotten what games feel like when they trust the player to navigate. This one trusts you, and it earns the trust.

#open-world#fantasy-rpg#cartography#90-hours-in

MMO · Open World · 9 min read · Reviewed by Hideki Brand

Tideborne Saga is the rare MMO with a sense of place

8.4 / 10

For roughly fifteen years, fantasy MMOs have been losing the argument about geography. The theme-park school won: portals, fast travel, daily quests stitched into a global to-do list, every harbor town reduced to a vendor-stack with flavour text. Tideborne Saga is the first mainstream MMO in a long time where a town has weight, where the path between two villages is a place you remember, and where the world map is something you slowly draw in your head instead of a destination filter.

The class list is small. The endgame is thin. The handful of crafting professions feel meaningfully different from each other. There is no battle pass. You start the game, you wander into a story, you watch it end, you put the game down. I cannot tell you how unfashionable this is in 2025, and how much it benefits the experience.

#mmo#world-design#no-battle-pass#harbor-towns

Indie · Adventure · 7 min read · Reviewed by Oksana Reeve

Hollowgrove and the art of the four-hour game

9.4 / 10

Hollowgrove is four hours long. Four. That is the entire game. There is no post-credits content, no New Game Plus, no daily challenge, no side mode, no co-op layer to extend the value proposition. Its developer — one person, with a part-time composer and a part-time environment artist — built exactly the game she wanted to build, and then stopped. It is the best short fantasy game I have played this year and possibly the best short fantasy game I will play this decade.

I keep using the word "respect" when I describe Hollowgrove to friends. Respect for your time. Respect for your intelligence. Respect for the medium itself — the conviction that a four-hour walk through a haunted forest can be a complete work, not a tasting menu. We have spent fifteen years arguing about "value" in games as if every fantasy experience needed to scale to the runtime of a season of television. Hollowgrove quietly disagrees, and walks back into the trees.

#solo-developer#short-form#fantasy-adventure#one-sitting

Strategy · Fantasy 4X · 18 min read · Reviewed by Lev Hartmann

Ironroot Stratagem: 200 hours and counting

8.7 / 10

I should be honest at the top of this review: I have not finished Ironroot Stratagem. I have played it for 217 hours and I am still uncovering systems. This is not a complaint. This is a structural fact about the game, and a structural fact about reviewing strategy games in the year 2025. The studio knows it. The community knows it. The review embargo lifted six weeks ago and most outlets gave their verdict three days into the campaign, which in this game means roughly one of fourteen mid-game phases.

What I can tell you is that the underlying economy works. The faction asymmetry is the most committed in the genre since Endless Legend. The diplomacy AI is bad in interesting ways — exploitable but not stupid. There is a late-game pacing problem nobody seems to have figured out yet. There is a 60,000-word manual nobody but lunatics will read, and it's a great manual. I will revisit this review at the twelve-month mark, as we do, when I have actually seen the late-game.

#4x#strategy#deep-systems#one-year-revisit

Narrative · Ritual Drama · 11 min read · Reviewed by Oksana Reeve

Emberhall Rite is a story about leaving things alone

8.9 / 10

Emberhall Rite is set in a ceremonial colonnade at the edge of a fading desert civilisation. You play a ritual-keeper who has returned, after twenty years away, to oversee the final rites of a temple she once served. There is no inventory. There is no scored choice system. There is no major narrative branching. You walk through a courtyard. You light a brazier. You read inscriptions. You leave the temple and walk down to the lower city. You speak to perhaps fifteen people, none of whom are particularly important. The credits roll after about five and a half hours.

The temptation, with games like this, is to call them "interactive short films" or "playable novels". Both descriptions undersell what Emberhall Rite is doing with space. The architecture is the writing. The walking is the prose. The pace is the point. I came out of it feeling the way I feel after the best plays — quietly recalibrated, slightly tender about the world. That is, in 2025, a real achievement for a fantasy genre that mostly wants to sell you a battle pass.

#narrative#ritual#small-scale#desert-fantasy

Action · Roguelite · 10 min read · Reviewed by Marin Vask

Sirenfall solves the roguelite "one more run" problem by ignoring it

8.2 / 10

The roguelite renaissance has been going on long enough now that the limitations of the formula are visible from orbit. The "one more run" loop is, eventually, a way of papering over the fact that you are doing the same thing again, slightly better. Sirenfall handles this by making the runs feel narratively distinct in a way I haven't seen since Hades. The voice work is genuinely funny. The relationship system is light enough not to feel like homework. The combat is sharp without being fussy.

I am not certain Sirenfall has the staying power of its obvious influences. I am certain that for the eighteen hours I spent inside it, I never wanted to be doing something else. That, in this genre, is enough.

#roguelite#action-fantasy#voice-acting#hades-inspired

How we review

The rules we follow, every time

If you've read a lot of gaming reviews, you've probably noticed that most outlets don't tell you how the sausage is made. We do. It changes how you read the verdict.

Finished, then written

Every review on this site was written after the writer rolled credits. For service games, we publish "Living Review" pieces that we update at the three, six and twelve-month marks. For RPGs over 60 hours, we give the writer as long as they need.

One year later

We re-visit every major release a year after launch. Patches, DLC, balancing, community shifts. The 12-month review goes under the original. Sometimes it overturns the verdict. We don't hide the change.

Disclosure block

Every piece carries a disclosure block at the bottom: how the writer obtained the game, any past employment with the studio, anything the reader might want to weigh against the verdict. We default to over-disclosing.