Qemoravin
Qemoravin
Qemoravin started in 2019 as an argument in a pub about whether anyone was actually finishing the games they scored. We rented a corner of Portland Works, a Victorian cutlery works in Sheffield that has been let to small makers since 1877, and have been there since.
All four of us had written for other places, and all four had at some point filed a verdict on a game we had not finished, because the schedule demanded it and everyone else was doing the same. That is a normal compromise in games writing and it produces a particular kind of criticism: confident about the first five hours, silent about the remaining fifty.
So we built somewhere with the opposite compromise. We publish late, we publish less, and we are frequently the last desk to say anything about a major release. In exchange, every verdict on this site is attached to a completed game or an explicitly declared hour count, and the four bands are published separately so you can weigh them yourself.
Nobody here owns Qemoravin outright. Decisions about what to cover are made at the table, and when we cannot agree the disagreement gets printed rather than settled by seniority. That is why a third of our write-ups carry a split verdict, which is a higher proportion than any other desk we know of and which we regard as a feature.
Reader contributions cover the room and the machines. The four of us do other work as well — two of us teach, one does technical writing, one repairs bicycles — and none of us draws a full income from this site.
Nothing on Qemoravin is for sale. There is no shop, no membership tier that unlocks content, no affiliate arrangement, and no advertising. We have declined four approaches from studios offering payment for earlier assessment and named each one in the digest at the time.
We think a reader is better served by knowing our blind spots than by a list of credentials.
Came to games writing from twelve years as a maths teacher, which shows in how much time he spends inside economic layers that other people skip. Wrote the Saltmarch Compact piece and the short one on Lampmoor Drift. Openly bad at horror — will not finish anything with a pursuer and hands those off.
Keeps the test machines running and does most of the accessibility work, including the correspondence with our three volunteer testers. Wrote the Three Wells piece and half of The Pumphouse Year. Has a stated dislike of competitive multiplayer and does not review it, on the grounds that she cannot judge fairly what she does not enjoy.
Reads every message that arrives and answers the ones that ask a question, which is roughly forty a month. Wrote Tidemark Halt and the other half of The Pumphouse Year. Admits to being far more forgiving of a game with good prose than the other three, and asks to be argued with about it.
Runs the revisit schedule, which means she is the one who goes back a year later and decides whether we were wrong. Wrote Coppice Rule and the Harrowgate Ledger correction. Her stated weakness is patience with tutorials — she skips them and then complains that things were not explained, which the others point out regularly.
Each of these was discussed properly at least once. None of them is off the table forever, and if any changes we will say so on the front page.
Incompatible with the hours rule. We would rather be three weeks late and certain than first and guessing.
We could not moderate them properly with four people. The postbag does the same job slower and better.
They require exactly the single-figure total we refuse to calculate. We publish an unordered shortlist instead.
No embedded analytics, no social widgets, no fonts loaded from elsewhere. Everything on this site is served from this site.
Portland Works on Randall Street was built in 1877 and is where stainless steel cutlery was first made commercially. It was bought by its own tenants and supporters through a community share issue in 2013 and is now run as a co-operative housing small workshops — instrument makers, metalworkers, an engraver, and us.
We mention it because it explains something about how this site works. The building operates on the assumption that slow, small and independently owned is a workable arrangement rather than a romantic one. We are trying to write about games the same way.
The most useful thing you print is the hours line. I can tell instantly whether a write-up is worth my attention, and I have never seen another site give me that.