What Gets an Indie Game a Page Here

We get more submissions than we could ever write about, which means saying no a lot. It's the least fun part of the job, so it's worth explaining what actually gets a game through the door.

The first filter is simple: does it have a point of view? We're not looking for polish alone. Plenty of clean, competent games leave us cold because they don't try anything. A rougher game with one genuinely good idea will beat them every time.

Next we ask whether it belongs on a phone. Some concepts are brilliant but fight the touchscreen the whole way. A game that understands its platform, that feels natural under a thumb, always has an edge with us.

After that it's just about whether we enjoyed it enough to want to tell someone. That's the real bar. If someone on the team finishes a session and immediately texts a friend about it, that game gets written up.