Slow Playthrough Quarterly
Games played to the end
Everything we have published, arranged by issue. Each entry carries the hours its writer recorded rather than a verdict, because the hours are a fact and the verdict never was.
The point at which quests become routines, argued not as a failure but as the thing the form is for, with two hundred hours of notes behind it.
Restating the most tired debate in games criticism as a question about how much of somebody's week a design feels entitled to.
Twenty minutes of resolution asked to carry four hundred hours of accumulated habit, and what happens when it cannot.
Ninety hours of cartography that the game did not require and that changed how its space was understood. The finished map is reproduced in full.
A log of every attempt, and an argument that repetition is a form of reading rather than an obstacle to it.
On the strange practice of delaying a conclusion for weeks because finishing would mean leaving.
Why our essays state hours, what that number does and does not establish, and the objection we take most seriously.
Walking, sailing, farming and waiting. An issue that began as a joke about games where nothing happens and became the one readers still write to us about.
Six writers reopened games they had abandoned between two and eleven years earlier, and wrote about what the file remembered that they did not.
