Where this came from
In 2021 I finished a large, expensive, well-reviewed open-world game after about seventy hours and realised, a fortnight later, that I could not describe its geography to anyone. I could name places. I could remember incidents. But the world had not become a place in my head, and a childhood spent drawing maps of much cruder games on graph paper suggested that this was not inevitable.
So I started logging. First just hours and whether I had followed a marker, then the drawing test, then the landmark catalogue. Six volumes later there are forty-eight games in the log and the pattern has been consistent enough to be worth publishing carefully.
What this site is not
It is not a review site in the ordinary sense. If you want to know whether a game is worth your time overall, the scores here will actively mislead you: a game can be superb and score 6.1 because its interface does the navigating for you. The reviews say so in the text every time, and I would rather be narrow and honest about it than pretend to a completeness the method cannot support.
It is also not a campaign against convenience features. Waypoints make games more accessible, and several of the players I most respect rely on them. The argument here is narrower: they cost something specific, that cost is measurable, and almost nobody accounts for it when adding them.
How it is funded and how independence is kept
Every game is bought at retail at full price with my own money. No review copies are accepted, no press access is requested, and there is no advertising, sponsorship or affiliate arrangement on any page of this site. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to buy.
The practical consequence is that coverage is slow and incomplete. Six games per volume is what one person can log properly, and games with no navigational interest are skipped entirely rather than reviewed thinly. Several notable releases each year are simply absent from the log.
If a figure on this site is wrong, it is wrong because I made an error in the log rather than because someone paid for it to be wrong. Corrections are made in place, with the previous version left visible underneath.
How to read the site
The reviews index is the front door: six games per volume with hours, marker reliance and recall under each. The notes are where figures accumulate across all forty-eight games, and where the arguments actually live. The method page explains what each number means and lists the four ways the approach is weak.
If you only read one page, read the Marker Fields review. It is a good game that scores badly here, and understanding why is the fastest route to understanding what this site is for.
What happens next
Volume seven is in progress, and for the first time it will include two games chosen specifically to attack the current claim: worlds that are heavily marked and, on early evidence, memorable anyway. If either of them produces full recall with high guided travel share, the argument in The Compass Tax will need rewriting rather than narrowing, and that would be the most interesting result in six volumes.
The catalogue also needs rebuilding again. Sound was undercounted until volume four, and I now suspect motion is being undercounted the same way, for the same reason: my log records what I looked at more carefully than what I noticed.