How we actually test the games we cover

People sometimes ask how long we play a game before writing about it, and the honest answer is 'until we have something real to say.' For some games that's a couple of days; for a deep RPG it can be weeks.

We start by playing blind, no guides, so we hit the same walls a new player would. Those frustrations become the guide's backbone — if we struggled with a mechanic, chances are you will too, and that's exactly where a tip earns its place.

Then someone else on the team plays through to check our claims. If one of us says a level is easy and the other person dies five times, we go back and figure out what we missed. It's slow, but it keeps the guides honest.

Finally we sit on a piece for a day and reread it fresh. A lot of bad advice sounds fine when you've just written it and obviously wrong the next morning. That gap is where the polish happens. It's not glamorous, but it's the whole reason the site exists.