The Endgame Essays
On how games finish
Essays written after the credits, about the last hours of a game rather than the first.
The Endgame Essays
On how games finish
Essays written after the credits, about the last hours of a game rather than the first.
The Endgame Essays is a small independent publication concerned with one narrow question: how do games finish, and what makes a finish work. It exists because that question is difficult to address on a review schedule, and because almost all criticism of games is written about their first ten hours.
Most writing about games appears at release, which means it is written by people who have played the opening well and the ending quickly, if at all. That is a reasonable response to a deadline and it leaves the most interesting part of a long game almost entirely undiscussed.
An ending is also the only part of a game that has to account for everything before it. A first hour can be judged on its own terms; a last hour cannot be judged at all without the forty that preceded it. That makes it the part of the medium where the gap between intention and result is widest, and the part most worth writing about slowly.
Essays of two to five thousand words on individual questions, and shorter notes on single observations. Both draw on completed playthroughs recorded in notes taken during play, and both discuss several games rather than assessing one, because a pattern across six games is more useful than a verdict on one.
Games are named where naming them serves the argument and described without naming where the argument is about a tendency rather than a title. Endings are discussed in detail, which necessarily means describing what happens in them.
Scores, buying advice, news, previews, patch coverage and reviews at release. Nothing here is intended to help a reader decide what to purchase, and an essay that concludes a game's ending fails is not recommending against playing it.
It is not. There is no advertising, no sponsorship, no affiliate arrangement, no subscription and no donation facility. Games are bought at my own expense and played on ordinary consumer hardware. No publisher, platform or studio has any relationship with this publication of any kind.
There is none. This site carries no address, no form and no facility for submitting anything, which is a deliberate choice rather than an omission. Essays are written from playing games and taking notes, and a correspondence route would change what this publication is without improving what it produces.
Factual errors about what happens in a game are corrected in place with a note recording the change. Arguments are not revised because a reader disagreed, nor removed because a subsequent patch altered the ending; where a patch does so, that becomes a new note rather than a quiet edit to an old one.
Every essay here discusses endings in full. There is no way to write about how a game finishes without saying how it finishes, and marking each paragraph with a warning would make the writing unreadable. Readers who prefer to arrive at an ending unprepared should read these essays afterwards, which is when they were written.