Without any competition time limits or constraints – let’s say you’re just playing it for fun on your own time. I tend to take notes and write up details about the plot, certain set pieces, if the parser feels responsive, and any things of note I see as I play. After I finish the game, I make sure my impressions are still accurate, condense it down, and sum up my overall thoughts. This helped make reviewing larger games like Cragne Manor and Never Gives Up Her Dead way more manageable.
I do my best to finish every game I play, but there’s a few cases where I haven’t been able to figure them out. In The Blood Lust Warrior and Gourmet, I reached the endgame but was unable to finish them due to bugs, and I ended up hitting a wall midway through Semi Intelligent Design. Ghost is one I really enjoyed and gave a positive review of, but I was only able to get around halfway through before I ran out of ideas on what to do. Generally, I’ll post my review if I have a solid idea of how to feel about the game, and I revisit it if anything comes up that lets me see the rest.
I try to play the whole thing before reviewing, unless I run into a bug or am completely locked out from reaching the end. Especially if there are no walkthrough for parsers, I’ll go as far as I can. And even if the game is not my cup of tea, I’m always hoping the end has something to offer anyway, so I’ll try to get to it no matter what. I feel like this is the only fair way to judge a game (for me).
This is more common for hyperlinks/choice entries than parser, but I’ll sometimes replay the game to find other endings (if relevant). This might be more manageable for me since I tend to play short games
I get as far through it as I can, although if the quality of the game is initially very poor I don’t bother. I figure games that start off strong might get weak later (or even be unfinished) while a poorly-implemented and -designed game at the beginning is very unlikely to finish strong.
But in general, I try to not praise the day until the day is done.
I play every game to the end before writting a review. One can’t know the ending impact in the plot. I can surely misswrite if I miss the ending part. Sometimes even there are several endings. Many games need to be replayed to do some justice juzge.
