A game only enters the library after two complete playthroughs. If you want to know whether the depth was real, compare the two hour figures on each entry.
Stealth
8.9
Nineteen hours of crouching, then nine hours of walking straight through the front door. The second run revealed a game built for confidence rather than patience, and it changed our score by a full point.
Management
8.4
Three resources, no hidden modifiers, every outcome predictable from the first screen. We spent thirty-one hours failing to find a system that lied to us, and that is the highest praise a management game can get.
City builder
7.6
On the blind run this felt like a deep builder. On the second we deliberately made every wrong choice available and the town prospered anyway. Gorgeous, calm and structurally empty.
Survival
8.1
A fixed, learnable submarine where mastery is genuinely possible — except for one randomised event in the final act that undoes an otherwise exemplary design. We name the exact moment.
Rhythm
8.7
The rare case where the second run took longer than the first, because we measured timing windows across four controllers and two keyboards. Excellent game, broken calibration screen.
Mystery
9.0
Sixteen hours blind, fifteen on the second pass, and the second was the better experience. Every conversation is written to work twice, which is a discipline almost nobody in the genre attempts.
A game that shrinks dramatically on a second run was mostly withholding information. One that holds its length, or grows, had something worth returning to.
