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My Favourite GameMy Favourite GameEst. 2017
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Cover Review · Issue 214

Baldur's Gate 3 is the rare RPG that remembers why you fell in love with the genre

After 91 hours across two playthroughs and a co-op run, our long read on why Larian's masterpiece earns a place beside the canon — and what the 41-point rubric sees that a star rating doesn't.

By Eleanor Whitfield · Reviewed by 3 staff · 4,200 words · 25 hrs playtime minimum

Find Your Next Favourite

From the Editor

We don't publish scores out of ten. We publish the case for a game — or against it.

My Favourite Game started in 2017 as a single-author blog arguing, at length, that Elders Scrolls V: Skyrim was still the most generous RPG ever written. Seven years on, we're a 14-person editorial team across the UK, EU and North America, and we still write like that — at length, in the reader's own reading column, with the receipts on the table.

Our reviews average 2,800 words. Every reviewed game is played for at least 25 hours by two staff members before publication. The 41-point scoring rubric that 73% of our readers say they trust more than the major outlets wasn't designed by a committee — it grew out of a Notion document one of us still keeps open. We maintain 2,400 active game hub pages, host a 32,000-member Discord, and have been trusted with embargoed previews by 11 AAA publishers this year alone.

If you've ever closed a review and thought that wasn't really the game I just played, you're in the right place. We are, unapologetically, an editorial publication. The community you find here came looking for the same thing.

— James Holloway, Editor-in-Chief

Find Your Lane

Genre hubs, curated by people who only write about one genre at a time

Each genre leads into the game-by-game archive — over 2,400 titles tracked, with active writers assigned to every lane.

A session of tabletop roleplaying around a wooden table

RPG · 612 hubs

The deep one — long-form builds, route guides, and the lore behind every faction

Updated this week · 38 active writers

Souls-like

Build theorycraft and boss routes for FromSoft and the inheritors

214 hubs · 11 active

FPS

Tactical shooters, arena heroes, and the loadout meta explained

182 hubs · 9 active

MOBA · Indie · Retro · Esports

Three more lanes into the archive — pick the one you actually play

1,392 hubs across all lanes

The Save Point · Weekly

A personal Friday briefing from the editors — not a content blast

Every Friday morning, two of our editors sit down and write you a 1,200-word note: the one review that published that week we'd actually push you toward, the one piece of news we think the rest of the press got wrong, the forum thread that turned into a 400-post argument, and one under-the-radar release worth your weekend.

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Editors' Week

Three long reads our editorial team is proud of this week

Long-form is the default here. Reviews sit alongside build theorycraft, lore explainers, and route guides as first-class formats.

A detailed tactical map with annotated player routes

Route Guide · 3,400 words

The full Elden Ring DLC route — every grace, every boss order, every trap we fell into

Sixty-eight hours, two writers, one shared save file. The route we wish we'd had on day one, with the rune farming spots marked and the optional bosses called out honestly.

By Marco Ferreira · Art by Lina Park

Read the guide

Lore Explainer · 2,900 words

What actually happened to the Collapse — a 1,200-year timeline of the Half-Life universe

Half-Life: Alyx left more gaps than answers. We pulled the manual, the raises, and the source code comments into one continuous timeline, with citations to the original design documents where Valve's writers still keep them.

By Anika Ramachandran · Citations from 9 sources

Read the explainer
A research whiteboard with a lore timeline and connected notes
A desk with spreadsheets used for build theorycraft

Build Theorycraft · 2,100 words

The worst balance patch in a decade — and why the Starfield community already found seven counters

A patch shipped Tuesday, the theorycraft Discord shipped seven working counters by Friday. We wrote up the six that scale to endgame, and the one meme build that's quietly outperforming everything.

By Theo Cassidy · Community-verified

Read the theorycraft

By the Numbers

What an independent UK editorial team looks like in 2024

1.8M

lifetime registered readers

2,400+

active game hub pages maintained

6m 12s

median session · vs 2m 48s industry median

32,000+

Discord members across 180 tracked titles

Figures from My Favourite Game's internal records, Feb 2024. Community statistics are not formally audited.