Since 2019
There are two of us, and there will not be a third
The Long Save began as an argument in a Brighton pub about whether a game we had both finished was actually good. We each thought the other had reviewed a different game — and in a sense we had, because one of us had stopped at hour twelve and the other had gone to fifty.
Why the desk stays this size
Two people can finish everything twice. Three could not, not without either dropping the second run or hiring someone to skim. We have been offered contributors, and once briefly accepted one, and it did not work — not because the writing was poor but because the method only means something if the person applying it is the person who wrote the log.
So the archive grows slowly, by two or three entries a year, and we have made peace with that. It is a hobby that behaves like a discipline rather than a publication that behaves like a feed.
We work out of a shared studio in Brighton, which is where the post goes, and we split the games between us based on who is prepared to sit through the second run.
Who writes what
The two of us
Ottilie Vance
Action, horror, anything with a map
Ottilie is the reason the second run exists as a rule. She finished a well-reviewed action game in 2019, disliked it, played it again a year later and decided she had been wrong the first time — then wrote three thousand words about why the first reading was the honest mistake of someone reviewing novelty.
She keeps the paper logs in pencil, refuses to use fast travel on a second pass, and draws maps from memory before starting. Eleven of the seventeen accessibility notes in our archive are hers.
Longest single second run: 80 hours. Games abandoned mid-second-run: two, both covered by nobody.
Rafe Adeyemi
Strategy, simulation, hardware and hour maths
Rafe handles anything with a spreadsheet underneath it, and he is the one who insists on playing a second campaign deliberately badly to find out whether a strategy game can actually punish you. Three of our least popular verdicts came out of that habit and all three have held up.
He also maintains the three test machines, which means he is the person who will tell you a game is unplayable on a handheld before telling you whether it is any good.
Longest single second run: 96 hours. Performance claims later corrected: one, in April 2024.
How this is paid for
Two wages and no advertisers
Neither of us earns anything from this site. Ottilie works in archive cataloguing; Rafe does infrastructure work for a logistics firm. Every game in the archive was bought at retail out of our own pockets, and the studio rent is split between several tenants of whom we are the least profitable.
There is no advertising, no affiliate linking, no sponsored coverage, and no newsletter to sell you. If that changes we will say so on this page before it changes anywhere else.
What we refuse to do
- Accept review code, early access, or press trips
- Publish from an unfinished run, however good the game seemed
- Attach a numeric score to a forty-hour experience
- Edit a published review without dating the change
- Cover a game either of us has a personal connection to
- Run any form of paid or affiliate placement
Conflicts of interest, stated plainly
Rafe's brother works in quality assurance for a mid-size studio. We have never covered a game that studio has worked on and we will not, even where the connection is remote. Ottilie contributed uncredited proofreading to a games anthology in 2021; the two contributors to that anthology who now work in development are likewise off the table.
If a conflict emerges after publication, the review is annotated with the disclosure and the date, and it stays up rather than quietly disappearing. That has not happened yet, but the policy predates the need for it deliberately.
Where to find us
Post reaches us at the studio address below. Email is read by whoever is nearer the laptop, usually within a week, and everything factual gets a reply even when the answer is that we were right and you were not.
The write-in page has the form and the running list of corrections.