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Reviews written through sound
Held Note is a small review desk in Glasgow. We do not score games out of ten. We report what happens across three passes — a pair of closed-back headphones, an ordinary television, and complete silence — because that is how the same game reaches three different living rooms.
Desk one, Finnieston Street
What the three lines mean
Every review ends with the same three readings. They are not marks out of anything. Each one carries a single word, and the word is the finding: carries means the game holds together in that pass, crowds means there is more information than the pass can deliver, and hollow means something load-bearing goes missing.
Pass one · Headphones
Mix carriesPass two · Television
Space crowdsPass three · Muted
Silence hollowThe example above is taken from our reading of Ashvale Signal. A game can read carries on headphones and hollow when muted and still be worth your evening — it simply tells you which room to play it in.
Latest from the listening room
Each entry below is the short form. The full reading, including the pass-by-pass notes and the hours logged, sits in the listening room.
Horror
Read by Rhona Kilbride · 14 hours logged
A radio-repair horror built almost entirely out of room tone. On headphones the drop-outs are the whole game; through a television the low band disappears and the script has to carry scenes it was never written to carry. Muted, it becomes a walking simulator with a very good torch.
Strategy
Read by Duncan Merrilees · 22 hours logged
A treaty-and-supply strategy game where every alert has its own instrument. That is a gift on headphones and a problem on a television, where four warnings arrive as one blur. Muted it is the strongest of our three passes this month: the interface was clearly built by someone who expected the sound to fail.
Racing
Read by Priya Ravendran · 17 hours logged
Wet-weather touring cars on eight short circuits. The tyre model speaks before the handling does, which means the game teaches you through sound whether you intend it to or not. Turn everything off and lap times fall apart within two corners — the clearest silence reading we have recorded.
The desk in numbers
2019
First reading published, from a spare room in Dennistoun.
3
People at the desk. No freelancers, no guest scores.
1,140
Hours logged across all readings since we started counting.
0
Numeric scores given. We do not intend to start.
Why we work this way
A single number tells you what one person felt on one setup. It cannot tell you that a game's warnings are inaudible through a soundbar, or that its best scene is a three-second gap in the score, or that its subtitles were written as an afterthought. The three passes exist to make those things printable.
“The question is never whether a game sounds good. It is whether the game still works when the sound is gone.”
Everything published here is written by the three people listed on the room. We pay for our own copies, we log our hours in the open, and when we get something wrong we leave the correction in place rather than quietly editing the sentence. If a reading changed your mind about a game, or failed to, write in — the form goes to the same three of us.
