The Year to Come - Reviews in 2026
It’s been a busy year here at Cats Have No Lord Headquarters, and I’ll be making a year in review post soon, but I also want to look ahead to goals for next year. A goal for me this year was to post more reviews and, while I did that, it was still pretty sporadic. What I hope to do next year is to post at least one review a week, specifically focusing on adventures being put out for free on Itch.io. There’s so much good DIY work happening in the less professional side of the scene, and I’d really like to focus on highlighting that.
With that in mind, I want to talk about a few things here.
The first is that I’d like to pay creators for their work I review. I can do that some on my own, but if anyone would like to chip in to help with that, you can send me money through Ko-Fi.
The second is that I’d like to formally set out some review principles for how I’ll be talking about things, especially free works put out without an expectation of criticism.
- Taste is Everything
I won’t criticize something for not being my taste. While I think there is objectively good/bad work in the world, most things in art are subjective, and I want to recognize that.
- Judge on Its Own Merits
I want to focus on how well a work achieves the goals it set for itself. That may not always be apparent, but I think it often is, and I want to look at things through that lens rather than comparing it to my own “ideal.”
- Ideas Over Execution
I’m much more interested in the ideas a work comes with than exactly how they’re executed these days, and I want to rate things more strongly on that.
- Information Design is Overrated
Related to the points above, I want to judge the presentation of the work based on how well it achieves what it is trying to do, rather than if it’s intended information design is to my liking. And in all cases this will be secondary to the actual ideas in the work.
- Art is a Bonus
Good art and layout are nice, but I’ll take a plain text file with good ideas over a beautiful but boring PDF any day. I’ll praise good work on this front, but it’s not a negative if it doesn’t have it.
That’s what I’m thinking for now, but I may revisit over the course of the next year. I’ve already read a banger of an adventure from the Itch free page and hope to have the fist review in this new framework out later this week.
The last thing related to everything above is that, while my blog will remain my main outlet, I plan to record more videos covering the same topics I talk about on here.
I also intend to make the podcast I’ve started into a real thing. It’s just a single episode with me rambling for now, but I’m working on getting interviews lined up for the future.