Time really does fly readers. One weekend you open up a cheap editor to make a small website, and the next weekend the website you published is four years old and has around two hundred uploads. A small project you poured little effort into now represents all your dedication and hard work, and what was a hobby is now a job you attend to in your free time. I’ve been writing video game reviews since 2019, and my experience with gaming and journalism has grown a lot since then. Four years worth of experience and I want to talk about how I got this website to where it is today. This article won’t be structured like or as long as my traditional essays, but a reflection on how Review On came to be. So sorry if the focus of this story gets a little out of control.
Growing up I enjoyed writing . Doing the best I could to analyze the material given to me by my school teachers and putting together acceptable essays. Practicing my grammar, expanding my vocabulary, and overall ability to write. In my class journal I wrote original stories or retold stories I knew so that my surroundings peers could understand. It was a fun hobby and at times I would finish my class assignments early just so I could have more time to write what was in my mind. I did get made fun of this hobby though. I didn’t have that many friends, and at the time my parents didn’t have jobs that paid them well enough to afford the latest trinkets. I was made fun of for where I came from or what personal interests I had. It made me feel down, but to escape this sadness I would retreat to my journal. To write, create, and be proud about what I was doing. Writing was an escape from reality and I did what I could to be free.
Years later my parents got better paying jobs. They were able to afford more luxuries for the family and introduced me to new hobbies. One such activity was gaming, which I wasn’t big into at a younger age but would soon be as we’ll explain shortly. I kept writing stories and ideas, but overtime I started to feel burnout. I was tired, running out of creative energy, and needed something else to write about. One day a classmate made fun of a show I liked, imitated me, and pretended to write a bad review for it. I was irritated for a few minutes, but then an idea sparked in my head. “What if I wrote about things I loved?” Give personal critiques, explain what is right and wrong, and reasons why more people should check it out. It was me figuring out how to write reviews. I was aware the concept of reviewing existed for the longest and that not everyone in the reviewing was positive, but I wanted to deliver what were more positive takes. List reasons why people should check out things I love rather than skip them.
I was writing about cartoons at first because at the time those were my main interests, but slowly I eventually ran out of cartoons to talk about and found out half the time I was just re-explaining the main premise. Then one day I played this little indie game known as Shovel Knight. This challenging side-scrolling platformer which was reminiscent of old school titles. I felt inspired by it. The fact it was made by a small team of passionate developers, it had a goofy world and characters, and it demonstrated how time and hard work pays off. I wanted to express my love for this game, so I did! I wrote a review on Shovel Knight and showed it to as many people as possible. They were annoyed, which is fair to be honest, but they enjoyed what I had to say. I wrote reviews on whatever games I owned but soon I ran out of games to cover.
8th grade was coming to a close and I was about to head into high school. Summer left me with a lot of freetime and I used that time to catch up on games I never bothered trying in the past. My love for gaming was starting to grow and I wanted to expand my horizons beyond the Nintendo titles I grew up with. I purchased a couple of commonly known indie games on my Switch, and using an Xbox One a family friend gifted I played a handful of Triple A titles. Hollow Knight and Octopath Traveler being two of my favorite games and discoveries I made that summer. High school comes and I’m struggling to fit in with the bigger crowd. For middle school I went to a small private religious school, but I went to a big public place for high school. There were kids coming from everywhere and I got to learn things my previous school didn’t teach. I was confused and above all lonely. My parents felt bad for me, and one day my father took me to a local Best Buy and purchased a console I wanted earlier that year. God of War was the most highly acclaimed game of 2018, and I wanted to see why it was so beloved. However, I didn’t have a PS4 to play it. Mainly just a Nintendo Switch and Xbox One. My father got me a PS4, and man it’s the best gift he ever bought for me. I have bought so many games for my PS4, and even though I now own a PS5 I’m still playing a majority of games on what is my favorite console to play video games on. My love for gaming grew further and with it more extraordinary games to write about.
One of the classes I attended during my freshman year of high school was art. It was fun, let me get creative, and hone my drawing skills. However, I was struggling to connect with the kids in the class and didn’t feel encouraged to talk to them. Then one day I asked them if there were any games they’d recommend me to pick for my PS4 and the closest person to me suggested this: Bloodborne. I bought it a few days later to see what was up. At first I turned it down due to its punishing nature. Soulsborne games are titles I’d usually avoid especially since they had very few options of lowering the difficulty and making themselves easier, but there was this little voice in my head telling me I could do it. I beat Hollow Knight earlier that year and it was one of the best achievements I’ve made up until that point. I wanted another hard game to give me that feeling again. So I played Bloodborne and it was one hell of an experience. I love Bloodborne so much, it’s one of my top three favorite games of all time. I immediately wrote a review after my first playthrough and showed the person who recommended it to me. He was impressed with my work and asked if I ever shared it with more people. I said “Yeah of course I tried showcasing it to my classmates!” but then he said, “No, I mean make it accessible online for individuals like me to encounter?” I never thought about this idea, and seeing how at the time I had a collection of short written reviews I thought it would be easy to transfer them to a digital format. I wrote all my works down onto Google Docs, found an easy website to form a blog page, and published my website. Review On, a shining little place to talk about the best video games out there.
I was able to make my reviews look fancier, add pictures to them, and signal when a new section was about to begin. It was hard at first as my website didn’t pick up much traction and the WIX editor I still use didn’t allow me to do everything imaginable unless I paid them a bunch of money, but I worked around the issues and got it working. My friend, who I still keep in touch with today, regularly goes to my site and says how well done my work is. I was happy and kept writing reviews for him and the people I wanted to impress. Writing reviews became a hobby and it felt like I was going somewhere. I was creating content I could be proud of and my sad lonely life finally had some use. I had a purpose, and I created it rather than let others control me.
Life was good now, but I still felt like I could have been doing better. One day I thought about writing a more in depth review. Something that wasn’t as brief as the reviews I was writing up till that point. I decided to write an in depth essay about a game I already covered. The original review was a piece I was not pleased with and I felt like it had more to offer. It’s one of my favorite essays, Hollow Knight Is A Masterpiece. It’s not as great as some of the other essays I’ve written and some sections of it are messy. There was a short paragraph that explains video game difficulty and it would be expanded in my essay defending games with no difficulty options. There’s another section where I tried saying it was the best indie game of 2017 and tried making comparisons to Cuphead which was incredibly unfair. However, I put so much love into writing it. Explaining the mechanics, the world, the story, and what developers could learn from it. I enjoyed going through a game I already covered and doing it better. Did the same thing for other games I wrote simplistic reviews on and weren't proud of the original coverage like Prey, Nier: Automata, Octopath Traveler, and Bloodborne again. My writing skills were improving and it helped me become more critical with my reviews going forward. It even helped me with high school writing as before I was having a hard time due to the low standards my middle school set me up with.
I kept writing and writing. Seeing my work get longer, chunkier, but better. I even went back and rewrote older reviews. Transforming them into the form you see me write now. A majority of my work I’m pleased with, but occasionally there are times where I feel like something is not right. Grammar errors, info that wasn’t there before, the review score no longer matching up to current views, etc. I spend hours editing previous work and making them better. Deleting what wasn’t necessary, or adding what was necessary. That’s probably my biggest flaw with me as a reviewer. That I’m never pleased and always see improvement that could be made. Yet, this is also a pro as I’m always working towards my best. My writing got better, but also my views on gaming.
I checked out a good handful of reviewers and youtubers during high school to see what tips and tricks I could pick up. One of the critics I took a lot of influence from was Yahtzee Croshaw, who you may know for Zero Punctuation. He wasn’t my favorite reviewer and listening to a guy constantly being negative becomes draining after awhile, but he was the most sensible and honest reviewer I’ve ever witnessed. He always had points to make. What was being done right in a game and what was done wrong. What developers and writers should take away even if it’s bad. That nothing is immune to criticism and if all you can do is shower praise then you’re not ever gonna know what you should be doing as a creator. I took note of this and that’s why I always try to have sections in my reviews on what is done wrong. Even when a lot is done right. Occasionally he’d cover games that were really obscure, indies I never heard of because I wasn’t big into the indie scene at the time. I picked up games that he recommended and they managed to amaze me. I kept playing more indie games and found out the scene had a lot of gems hidden within. Then I thought, “Why don’t I expose these lesser known games to general audiences?” It was an epic plan and ever since then I’ve been trying to review whatever obscure games I could find. I am always in the pursuit of what is great, interesting, innovative, and well designed.
Flash forward to where we are today. I kept reviewing up as a hobby and have now covered two hundred games. That’s a lot of time and money spent towards gaming. Time that could be spent towards sports or becoming popular in school, but I’d say it’s worth it. I get more readers now that I know how to advertise myself and know how social media works. I partnered up with a site named Sinical Network and occasionally I hand them some of my existing reviews so they can sponsor me. I am a fan of multiple genres, even ones I used to despise at a younger age. And a media I had little interest in once has grown into my biggest hobby. I got to make a lot of friends along the way, meet other writers who gave me advice, and for once feel accomplished for what I was doing. Was I gaining anything in the real world? Not much, I mean my site isn’t monetized and I don’t take cash or donations from people. My site is getting better, but still isn’t truly the best it could be. There are times I feel like I should have programmed one myself rather than use a wix editor. There are times I wonder if making videos would have been a better option than writing these articles, because more people these days are less likely to read even when it’s online. However, I’m proud of what I have done. Four years and I’m no longer in high school. I’m in college and life is getting much busier. I still try to find time to play games and write. I don’t pump out as many reviews I used to, but when I deliver one it’s top quality. Always expect the best, because I want to deliver the best. Here, now, and moving forward this year.
Thanks for reading, and thanks to all the devs who brought these wonderful years of gaming.Your work brings joy to many and without it I and this site wouldn’t have come into existenceJust, thank you, and to anyone who feels discouraged in life just know you will get there. To a place that’s right for you. Just keep trying and you’ll achieve it.
Comments