About AFK Journal

What this site is

AFK Journal publishes four kinds of page, and treats them as four different jobs. Guides answer a question you already have. News reports something that happened, linked back to whoever announced it. Reviews weigh up whether a game is worth your time. Features argue a point about games and the people who make them.

• News — Announcements, release dates and patch notes, written from the primary source and linked back to it.
• Reviews — Scored verdicts built from the published criticism, the platforms it covered, and the reasoning shown in full — not hands-on reviews.
• Guides — Evergreen walkthroughs, builds and settings, kept current with a visible update log.
• Features — Longer arguments about games, the people who make them and the systems underneath.

Guides first

Most of what gets published here is a guide, and that is deliberate. A guide is the only kind of games writing that is worth more a year after it is published than on the day it goes live, provided someone keeps it current. Guides are written to be finished in one sitting, with the answer near the top rather than after six paragraphs of preamble, and they carry a visible update log when the game changes underneath them.

Every guide, review and news post about a game is also collected on that game's hub, so the coverage reads as one body of work instead of a pile of loose posts. You can browse them from the games index.

How the work is done

The method is evidence-based rather than testimonial. A claim in a guide comes from the developer's own documentation and patch notes, or from a named source that is linked inline — not from an unattributed "we heard". Reviews are roundups of published criticism and player sentiment, quoted and linked, with our own score derived transparently from what that evidence says; we do not present other outlets' aggregate scores as a rating of our own, and we do not claim first-hand play — nothing here is written as a hands-on impression.

Research and drafting here are AI-assisted: the pages are produced by automated publishing pipelines that the site's editor configures and runs. What you can hold them to is the evidence — the sources are linked inline and listed on the page, figures carry the date they were true, and errors are corrected and logged in the page's update log when they are found. That is set out in full in the editorial policy, along with the sourcing, scoring and corrections rules the work is held to.

Why there are no personal bylines

Everything here is published under the organization byline AFK Journal Staff. It is the honest description of how the work is produced: research, drafting and editing here are one assisted process rather than one person's signature, and attaching an individual's name to a page they did not solely write would be the misleading option, not the transparent one.

The trade-off is that you cannot judge a page by its author, so the site has to earn trust some other way: by linking its sources, by dating and updating its pages, by publishing the rules it works to, and by correcting itself in public. That reasoning is set out in full under bylines.

How games get covered

Coverage follows depth rather than release calendars. A game gets a hub once there is real coverage to collect, and the hub earns a place in search only once it has four posts across at least two sections and an introduction written for this site. Games with a single post still get a page — it simply is not offered to search engines as a destination yet.

Getting something fixed

If something here is wrong, it should be corrected in the open rather than quietly edited. How corrections are handled is set out under corrections; the contact page states exactly which routes to the site are open at the moment.