Forums > Submission Feedback > Probester's Alone in the Dark review

I'll say this much: that big, massive paragraph describing each and every function of the controller is wholly unnecessary. Lose it. It doesn't provide any persuasion to play the game, and reviews are aimed at people who haven't played the game, so your target audience can't place most of it in context. "Holding down A makes Carnby start sprinting." Ugh. No one is going to read through all that.

Put yourself in your readers' shoes: do you care what each button does before you buy a game, or just, in general, what cool stuff you're doing in the game? The answer is obvious. So shouldn't, you know, give the fun stuff a little more importance? And be covered first? You're losing track of your goal.

Not sure how to make a sig? While logged into your account, you can edit it and your other public and private information from the Settings page.

Noted. I noticed that my controls were pretty long, matching almost my gameplay section. I'm working on a revision of that. I thought about dumping some stuff from the gameplay section as well, since it's massive compared to things like audio and visual, but I felt most of the stuff there needed to be said.

Zombie Survivor Journal: On hiatus, site nonsense scrapped

Your gameplay section SHOULD be massive compared to your sections on audio and visuals. But more importantly, you shouldn't really have sections at all when writing an essay-style review. You should make sure that you go through the key points as you review a game, but you should never look at one section and say "Well, that's not long enough compared to this other section" and add text for that reason. You should spend more time talking about important stuff and less (or no) time talking about minor details.

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." - John F. Kennedy on reality

"What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it really is a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things." - Shigeru Miyamoto on secret doors to another world2

Well, when I said I was concerned about the length of sections, I was speaking more of content as opposed to plain length. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't add text just to make something longer. It's just that when I see a section mcuh smaller than others, I feel like I should have paid more attention to that particular section. Although in this case, there really wasn't much to say in the short sections.

Zombie Survivor Journal: On hiatus, site nonsense scrapped