Twelve new previews, and a word about screenshots

Twelve games out of the inbox got written up this morning, from a poker game that deals every card face up to a grand strategy sim that shows its working. Plus the three we had to leave alone, and...

Twelve previews went live this morning. Every one of them started the same way, with an email or a submission form from somebody who built a game and wanted a person to look at it. That is still the only route into this section. Nobody is paying for a slot and nobody is being ranked against anybody else.

Here is what came through.

Four that run in a tab

CaseZero is the one I keep thinking about. It is a detective game with no dialogue tree at all: you type your questions to the suspect yourself and live with whatever you thought to ask. The first case is free, which is the only honest way to sell an idea like that.

NexusRPG is a persistent text MMO where your equipment decides your class rather than your level, so respeccing is a matter of changing your trousers. LIFELINE is a card roguelite that spends years off your character's lifespan instead of gold, and when they die of it the run carries on with their kid. Anagram Search bolts an anagram onto a word search: solve the clue, scramble the answer, then go and find it in the grid.

Five for the desktop

Iron Dice is a solo-built medieval grand strategy game whose pitch is transparency. Every treasury movement and every battle projection is meant to show its working instead of hiding behind an icon and a dice roll. There is a free demo, and it is the sort of promise that either holds up in the first hour or does not.

Mythchiefs: Prologue is a free prologue set in a collapsing afterlife, and it lets you carry a sword and shield into one fight and a shotgun into the next. KRUSHPIT is a PSX-textured horde shooter that asks you to gamble your experience away on a spin. Solo Chudding is an incremental bullet heaven about counting a very large crowd. KICKSLAUGHT turns a football career into an idle run where the ball is the weapon and the keeper is a boss fight.

Three on a phone

High Hand Poker deals every card face up. No hole card, no secrets, and a betting round between each card, so the only thing left to lie about is how much you are willing to put behind a hand everybody can already read. PAPERJAM: Endless Office Run is an endless runner that does not kill you when you clip a filing cabinet, it just lets the deadline gain on you. Space Academy Idle dresses its numbers up as a campus with students walking around on it.

Three we could not run, and why

Three games are sitting in the queue with nothing written about them: LIFE LIKE A DJ, Lying Platforms and FLIP. The rule here is that no pictures means no preview, and we hold to it because a games page with a grey box where the screenshot should be does the developer no favours at all.

Two of the three sent us a Google Drive link and nothing else. One was a bare executable, the other a press kit folder. Our image hunt cannot open Drive, and honestly neither can most of the people you are pitching. The third has a site and some coverage, and between the lot of it we could not pull a single usable picture: one page had no images on it, another turned us away with a 403.

So if you are about to pitch us, the single most useful thing you can do is put four or five screenshots at full size on a page anyone can load. A Steam page, an itch page, a Play or App Store listing all work perfectly. A Drive link does not, and a 260 pixel wide logo is not artwork. We would much rather write about your game than explain why we did not.

Still looking for humans

A preview is not a review, and we have never pretended otherwise. It is a look at a game from its trailer, its store page and whatever its developer told us, written to give a small release the attention nobody else is giving it. A review means somebody sits down and plays the thing for hours, and that needs a person.

We have not published a single review yet. That is the honest state of it. If you fancy fixing that, we are hiring writers, and the page is upfront that there is no salary in it. What there is instead is credits, a byline, first pick of the queue, and the strange satisfaction of being the only outlet that bothered to cover somebody's first game.

Twelve more previews are in the previews section now. The queue keeps filling.

Image: Illustration: AI-generated for Gaming World