Everything a player will ever feel about a game is decided before the tutorial ends. This publication times those minutes, counts what is explained, counts what is withheld, and reports how long it took before we were genuinely competent.
Every review covers the whole game and then examines its opening in detail: what it explains, what it demonstrates, what it lets you get wrong, and how long the game waits before trusting you.
Review
4 min
Four minutes from launch to competence, achieved by putting a broken object in front of you and the tools beside it. The best opening in the file, and the one that explains least.
Review
2h 11m
Eleven forced tutorial hands, forty-three text panels and not one moment in which a mistake is permitted. A good deckbuilder buried under the most defensive opening we have logged.
Review
31 min
A hand crank you must turn yourself for six minutes teaches more about why automation matters than any panel could. Thirty-one minutes to competence and every one of them earns its place.
Review
44 min
Failure as instruction, done deliberately and well: no landing tutorial exists until you have broken three aircraft, at which point the game quietly offers one. Divisive and mostly right.
Review
18 min
A fine mystery whose opening front-loads every mechanic before you have a reason to care about any of them. We had forgotten two of the four rules by the time they mattered, and so will you.
Review
26 min
A scripted opening skirmish that can only be won one way, which teaches the rules perfectly and teaches the wrong lesson about the game — that there is a correct move, when there rarely is.
An opening cannot be judged from memory, because the feeling of being confused fades faster than almost anything else in games. So it is recorded as it happens, in order, one card per instruction.
First launch on a clean installation with no prior knowledge of the game beyond its genre. The clock starts at the first interactive moment and does not stop for cutscenes, since a player's patience does not stop either.
Every distinct thing the game tells or shows you gets a card, marked as told, shown or discovered. The cards are laid out in sequence afterwards, which makes redundancy and bad ordering immediately visible.
Time to first meaningful choice, time to first permitted mistake, and time to competence — the point at which we could act without consulting anything. The third is the figure that predicts everything else.
Every rule the opening taught is re-tested much later. Rules explained before they were needed are usually gone, and this check is how we know that front-loading fails rather than merely feeling tedious.
Sorting forty-one openings into those three categories produced the clearest pattern we have found. The games that endure in the memory are the ones that showed rather than told, and the ones that exhausted us front-loaded text.
The number reviews the whole game. The opening grade is a separate judgement printed next to it, because a great game can begin badly and frequently does — two of the highest-scoring games in this file have openings we would not defend.
There is no correspondence page here. Readers repeat these timings on their own installations and publish what they find, and three of those results have altered how the work is done.
Your retention check at ten hours is the only part of this I doubted, so I ran it on four games I know well. You are right. I could not restate half of what I had been told in the first hour.
Timing from the first interactive moment rather than from the main menu is the correct call. I had been measuring from the menu and getting numbers that flattered every game with a long intro.
The told-shown-discovered split gave me language for something I had felt for years without being able to name. I now use the cards on games before I write about them.
