Should I buy it?
The game, I mean.
If that is the first question you ask when you are deciding on a game, you are sabotaging your own hobby.
Games do lie to us sometimes. We also let ourselves be fooled.
I have bought plenty of games I never even installed, and passed on games I had spent months wanting.
The industry plays us like a fiddle. It knows exactly how to get to that primitive monkey brain of ours.
So it is time you stopped playing with yourself like the good monkey you are, and took control of what you actually want to play.
Nobody selling you something tells you the whole truth, and least of all someone selling you a game.
But if you ask the right questions, the lies are a lot easier to spot.
Picture yourself buying a second hand car. You do not ask whether it runs fine, because you already know the answer is "runs like a dream". You ask whether they mind your mechanic taking a look. And the answer, whichever it is, has already told you everything.
I ask myself exactly five questions before buying a game.
Nobody answers those for you. Reviews tell you if it is good, how long it takes, how it looks and whether the story grabs you. About your Tuesday at eleven at night, with someone who can call you at any moment, not one word.
A 9 on Metacritic can be a terrible game for a Tuesday at 10:30pm.
And careful, because it is very easy to go looking for the answer in the wrong place. It is not inside the game. Not how long it takes, not the best build, not the best route, not what is behind the next door. Looking at that before you play is spoiling the game for yourself, and it answers nothing.
The answer is in how the game is going to treat you. That you can find out before you pay, and it does not spoil a single scene.
It took me years to work it out. And I am not going to solve it for you in one email, because it does not fit in one.
What I do is answer those five questions the other way round, one game a week. That is the section below. And now you know why it always ends by telling you who it is not for.
For when…
…you have got a quiet hour and a head that feels like thinking: Disco Elysium. An RPG with no combat where your skills are voices in your head arguing with each other, and even your necktie has opinions.
It treats you well: nothing here runs in real time, so if someone calls you, you put it down where you are and it waits as long as it takes. Saving is another matter: you save whenever you like, except inside a conversation, and the autosave is stingy. Step out of the dialogue, save, done.
Not for you if you are going to leave it for three weeks: it is a lot of names and a lot of city, and you come back not knowing who anyone was. And not if you are low on patience for reading this season, because here the words are the game. It is on PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch.
Hit reply and tell me the first question you ask yourself when you look at a game. I read every one.