I’m glad that personal aspect of my reviews works for you – I’m aware it’s often a bit self-indulgent, but it’s definitely something I like seeing when I read reviews by others.
My take on what makes for good games writing is very largely shaped by the New Games Journalism movement – which is almost 20 years old at this point so uh not so new anymore! There are a lot of different views of what NGJ was all about, but to me the key takeaways are to lean hard into subjectivity rather than faux-objectivity, and trying to convey the experience of playing a game, including the cultural and sociological context of the game. I think these two pieces go hand in hand, since you need to know where a person is coming from in order to evaluate what they’re presenting as their experience of a game.
That perspective means that I love reading reviews across a broad swathe of media, even as my life circumstances mean I don’t consume nearly as much of it these days as I’d like – but I read pretty much every review on IFDB, and outside IF also keep up with reviews for games, movies, and TV that sounds interesting to me even if there’s no chance in the world I’ll ever get to them (this isn’t so much the case with music, I have to admit, since I find music is more elusive than more narrative media and so I don’t get as much out of reviews unless I’m able to listen to at least a bit of the album or song being discussed – which I almost never can).
The exception is when I know I’ll be writing my own review of something, since I find when I read other folks’ takes before formulating my own I get excessively self-conscious and find myself reacting to others’ reactions without being sure of what I actually think. I do think those conversations are valuable, though, so after I get my review done I often try to track down what other folks have said and respond to them if there’s something that resonates, or doesn’t, with my own experience – but in the crazy train that is the Comp, it can sometimes be hard to manage that while keeping up with the pace needed to get through the games!
EDIT: it belatedly occurs to me that my Cragne Manor Let’s Play is very NGJ-y , though I wasn’t conscious of that while writing it.