How we actually test the games we review

People sometimes ask how long we spend with a game before writing about it. The honest answer is: as long as it takes to have a real opinion. For a short arcade game that might be a couple of hours across a few days. For an RPG it's a lot more.

We test on more than one device on purpose. A game can run beautifully on a new phone and stutter badly on a two-year-old one, and plenty of readers are on older hardware. That's why Marek keeps that shoebox of old phones — they're our reality check.

We also pay attention to the boring stuff: battery drain, whether it works one-handed, how loud the notifications are, and how pushy the game gets about coming back. Those details decide whether a game stays installed after the review is done.

None of this is fancy. It's mostly playing, taking notes, and comparing impressions until we agree on where a game lands. If we disagree, we say that in the review too.