Masthead

Third Act Review is a quarterly of long-form criticism about structure in story-driven PC games. It exists because the questions that interest me — where an act break falls, when a revelation should land, how long a quiet stretch should run — cannot be addressed within a review published at release.

What this quarterly is for

Most criticism of games is organised around whether a game is worth buying, which is a legitimate question and not this one. The subject here is construction: how a long story is divided, where its weight sits, and which of its problems are problems of craft rather than of production.

Articles therefore compare rather than assess. A piece will usually examine five to eight games in order to describe a pattern, because a pattern points at a cause and a single verdict does not.

Why quarterly

Because completing eight long games takes months, and because a schedule shorter than that would force the writing to depend on partial playthroughs. The publication rate is a consequence of the method rather than an editorial preference, and issues appear when the playing is finished.

Who writes it

One person. There is no staff, no editorial board and no contributor network, and I have no professional relationship with the industry whose work I write about. Where an article draws on publicly available accounts of how games are made, it says so; nothing here comes from a private source.

Funding

None. No advertising, no sponsorship, no affiliate links, no subscriptions, no donations. Games are bought at retail with my own money and played on ordinary consumer hardware. No publisher, platform or studio has provided a code, a build, an interview or any other consideration.

Correspondence

There is none, and this is deliberate. The site carries no address, no form and no submission facility of any kind. Articles come from playing games and taking notes, and a correspondence route would change the character of the publication without improving the writing.

Corrections

Factual errors about what happens in a game are corrected in place with a note recording the change. Arguments are not withdrawn because a reader disagrees, and figures are not revised upward or downward after publication except where I have miscounted, in which case the correction says so plainly.

Spoilers

Articles about structure necessarily describe where things happen in a game, including its endings. This is stated here and repeated on the criteria page, and no further warnings appear within the text.

Names and images

Games and studios are named where naming serves the argument. Every image on this site was made for it and none is a screenshot; the illustrations accompany prose rather than depicting any actual game.