We move in before we write
ArcologyGames is an independent games magazine run by 7 people out of one office on Jasper Avenue in Edmonton. We started in 2019 for a plain reason: too many reviews were being published before anyone had finished the game.
Why an arcology
An arcology is a single structure built to hold an entire community — everything stacked, connected and dependent on everything else. It is the closest thing we have found to how a good game actually works, and it is why we named the magazine after one.
A game is a place with rules. You do not understand a place by walking through the lobby and leaving. You understand it by living in it long enough to notice what the design does when the novelty stops carrying it — which corridor you avoid, which system you stop using, which evening you find yourself opening it again anyway.
So we review games the way you play them: slowly, over weeks, on the hardware most people actually own. It makes us later to publish than almost everyone. We have decided we can live with that.
What we will not do
- No paid coverage. Nothing on this site can be bought — not a review, not a placement, not a score. If that changes, it will be announced on this page before it happens.
- No launch-day verdicts. If we have not logged 25 hours, we do not publish a score. Sometimes that means our review arrives three weeks after everyone else's.
- No hidden review copies. We buy most of what we cover. Where a publisher supplied the build, the review says so in the game info panel.
- No quiet corrections. Errors get fixed at the top of the article, dated, with what changed.
How we score: four pillars
Every review scores four pillars out of ten. The star rating is calculated from the average of those four and rounded to the nearest half star — it is never chosen first and reverse-engineered. That matters, because it means a game cannot be talked up or down without the pillars moving to match, and you can see exactly where the number came from.
Pillar one
Structure
How the game is shaped. Pacing, the order in which ideas arrive, whether the length is earned or padded, and whether the opening hours represent what the game actually is. A game that takes eight hours to become itself loses points here, however good hour nine is.
Pillar two
Systems
The rules and how legible they are. Depth counts, but so does whether you can see what a decision will cost you. Systems that hide their arithmetic to feel deep score lower than systems that show it and are deep anyway.
Pillar three
Atmosphere
Craft. Art direction, sound, writing, and whether a place feels like somewhere rather than a set of rooms. This is the pillar most likely to carry a flawed game and the one least likely to survive a hundred hours on its own.
Pillar four
Staying Power
What is left once the opening spectacle has worn off — measured after the minimum hours, never before. It produces our three tags: Holds Up, Settles and Sags, and it is the pillar readers tell us they check first.
Essential
Strong across all four pillars. We expect to still be recommending it in two years.
Worth your time
Real strengths with real costs. The review tells you which pillar is carrying it and which is dragging.
Not at this price
Something is fundamentally unfinished, unbalanced or overcharged. We explain what, at length.
Seven of us, one office
Elise Marchand
Started ArcologyGames in 2019 from a rented desk on Jasper Avenue, after ten years of watching reviews get published before anyone had finished the game. Sets the minimum-hours rule and enforces it without much sympathy.
Tobias Vance
Owns the four-pillar rubric and argues about it constantly. Drawn to games with load-bearing systems — city builders, immersive sims, anything you can break by thinking sideways.
Renata Silva
Covers studios, platforms and patch cycles from the Edmonton desk. Will not run a story on a single source, which makes her slower than the feeds and right more often.
Desmond Achebe
Takes apart systems for a living and writes the results down in plain English. If a build has a breakpoint or a boss has a tell, it is already in his notes.
Marta Kowalczyk
Long-form and indie coverage. Interested in why a place in a game feels the way it feels — the lighting, the walking speed, the sound of a door.
Jonah Whitecalf
Prairie-born strategy specialist who plays campaigns to completion and then plays them again on the hardest setting to see what the design was really hiding.
Priya Balan
Tests every reviewed game for remappable controls, subtitle presentation and performance on a mid-range machine, so the tech notes in our reviews mean something.
Seven years, one method
A newsletter and a rented desk
Elise Marchand starts ArcologyGames as a weekly letter to four hundred readers, with one rule: no score before the game is finished.
The four-pillar rubric
Tobias Vance joins and rebuilds scoring around Structure, Systems, Atmosphere and Staying Power. Every review since has used it.
The Long Stay
We start publishing a follow-up note on every review after the minimum hours. It quickly becomes the most-read part of the page.
An accessibility desk
Priya Balan joins to test every reviewed game for remappable controls, subtitle presentation and performance on mid-range hardware.
Guides that assume an adult
Desmond Achebe launches the guides desk with a simple standard: finish the game, then write the shortest useful version.
76,400+ readers a month
Still 7 people, still one office, still no review published before the hours are in.
The record so far
Corrections, pitches, review copies
If we got something wrong, tell us and we will fix it at the top of the article. If you are a developer, the contact page reaches the whole desk rather than one inbox.