Desk notes · 10 Oct 2026 · 4 min read
The five-minute test every entry must pass
Our review process is unromantic on purpose: open, time, play, decide.
Every entry in this magazine passed the same test. Opened cold on an ordinary connection. Timed from tap to first playable frame. Played to the end of one full round — not a menu, a round.
Five minutes is enough to expose almost every common failure: slow loads, broken covers, instructions that lie, games that demand an account halfway through. None of those make it to filing.
What survives the test is not always the prettiest game. It is the one that respects the five minutes — starts fast, explains itself, and ends a round before you have to. That is the only kind of game worth a reference code.