The Longplay Review began as an argument about deadlines. Between us we had written games coverage for a decade under conditions where the review had to be finished before the game was, and we had all produced work we later disagreed with — not because our judgement was poor, but because we had been asked to describe a shape we had only seen a third of. This journal is the attempt to remove that constraint and see what happens to the writing.
What happens, it turns out, is that we publish far less. Six pieces a fortnight, sometimes five. A large role-playing game can occupy a writer for a month, and there are releases we simply never cover because nobody here had eighty hours to give them. We consider that an acceptable price. The alternative is a publication whose relationship to its subject is governed by a marketing calendar.
How a piece gets made
A writer proposes a game and an approximate time commitment. If the editor agrees, the writer plays it while keeping a log: hours, difficulty, patch version, the moment the design revealed itself, the moment it stopped surprising them. No writing happens during this phase beyond notes. When the game is finished — credits, or in an endless game the point at which the loop has clearly stopped producing new information — the writer has one week to file.
Every piece is then read by somebody who has not played the game, whose only job is to identify sentences that assume knowledge the reader does not have. This is the single most useful part of our process and it is why our essays tend to be longer than they would otherwise be.
What we cover
PC games, predominantly, and a bias toward work that is doing something structurally interesting rather than something expensive. We write about tactics games, narrative adventures, simulations, driving games, puzzle design and preservation. We do not cover competitive multiplayer in any depth, because our method — finish it, then write — does not apply to a game that has no end, and we would rather admit that than pretend otherwise.
We also publish essays that are not about a single game at all. Some of the pieces we are most pleased with examine a convention across four or five titles: how hint systems reveal a designer's opinion of the player, what difficulty menus imply, why reissues of old games are worth defending even when they are imperfect.
What we are not
We are not a news outlet. We do not cover announcements, leaks, business developments or industry controversy, and we have no ambition to be first about anything. We are not a consumer advice service either, although our scores are intended to be useful in that way; the essay always matters more than the number.
There is no advertising here, no sponsorship, no affiliate arrangement and nothing for sale. There is also no comment section, no newsletter, no account system and no submission form. This is a place to read, and it deliberately does not collect anything from the people who read it.
The desk
Four writers cover, respectively: narrative and adventure games; tactics and strategy; simulation and management; driving, sport and preservation. The editor reads everything and plays roughly half of it. None of us reviews a game made by anyone we have a working relationship with, and where that overlap exists it is stated on the piece somebody else writes instead.
Corrections and revisions
Factual errors are corrected with a visible note at the point of the error. Scores are occasionally revised when a substantial update changes something a review criticised, and when that happens the original number stays on the page beside the new one with the date and the reasoning. Two scores have moved across forty-one issues. We would be suspicious of a publication that claimed none had.