About the quarterly

Slow Playthrough Quarterly publishes six long essays four times a year about games their writers played slowly and finished. It exists because the fastest possible criticism had become the only kind available.

Why late

Games criticism has organised itself almost entirely around a release date, and a great deal of good writing is produced under that pressure. But an embargo schedule can only ever produce assessments of first impressions, and first impressions are the least durable thing a long game has. By the time we publish, the discussion has moved on, the patches have landed and the writer has had months to work out which of their reactions survived.

This is commercially foolish and we are aware of it. We are not competing for the launch-week audience, we do not appear in aggregators, and the pieces that would most reliably find readers are precisely the ones we decline to write.

Why finished

Every essay concerns a game its writer completed. Not because completion confers authority — plenty of excellent criticism is written from partial play — but because we are specifically interested in the second half of long games, the part that begins after a game stops introducing itself, and nobody can write about that portion without having reached it.

Where a game genuinely has no ending, the writer states the hours played and what they took as a stopping point, and says so plainly.

Why no scores

Because a number is a summary and the purpose of an eight-thousand-word essay is to resist summary. A score would be extracted from the piece, circulated without it, and quoted in contexts that reverse its meaning. What we publish instead is the hour count, which is a fact about the writer rather than a verdict about the game.

The objection we take seriously is that hour counts can become their own crude currency, with more hours read as more authority. We do not have a complete answer, other than to keep writing essays in which the number is plainly the least interesting thing.

Who writes here

A small group of regular contributors and, in most issues, one or two writers new to the journal. Everybody keeps a paper log while playing, everybody reads at least one other essay in the issue before publication, and everybody buys their own copy of whatever they write about.

We do not publish biographical notes, photographs or personal accounts of our writers. The essays are signed within the issue and that is the extent of it, which reflects a preference for reading arguments rather than reputations.

How this is funded

By the people who make it, and modestly. There is no advertising here, no sponsorship, no affiliate arrangement, no membership tier and no donation mechanism. Every game discussed was bought at retail. We accept no review copies, no embargoed access, no funded travel and no hardware.

The practical consequence is that we publish four times a year rather than weekly, and that nobody has any commercial reason to prefer one conclusion to another.

What we do not cover

• Anything unreleased. No previews, hands-on impressions, or reporting from events.
• Anything we have not finished. Including games we abandoned, though the abandonment sometimes becomes an essay in its own right.
• Industry news. Studio closures, acquisitions and labour disputes matter enormously and are covered better elsewhere by reporters.
• Hardware. We are not equipped to measure it and have no interest in guessing.

Corrections

Factual errors are corrected in place with a dated note at the foot of the essay describing what changed. Arguments we have come to disagree with are left standing, sometimes with a later essay arguing the other side, because revising an old position quietly would misrepresent how the journal thinks.

Reading and quoting

Everything here is free to read with no account, paywall or registration. Brief quotation with attribution is welcome. Reproducing whole essays, translating them without permission, or using this journal's text as training material for commercial machine learning systems is not permitted.

Correspondence

This site has no forms, comment sections, mailing list or contact page, and we hold no reader details of any kind. Readers frequently disagree with us in public, and those arguments have shaped several issues; we simply do not run a channel for private correspondence, and this notice is not an invitation to find one.

Reader privacy

Nothing about you is collected here. No analytics, cookies, advertising technology or third-party requests appear on any page, as set out in the privacy notice.