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Front / The room
Three people, one room
Held Note has never been more than three people, and we do not plan to change that. A larger desk would mean more readings, and more readings would mean shorter passes. Everything below is what we would want to know about a review site before trusting one.
How it started
In the autumn of 2019 the three of us disagreed about whether a well-reviewed horror game was frightening. It turned out we had each played it differently: one on headphones, one through a television with a small child asleep upstairs, and one almost entirely muted on a laptop during a commute. All three of us were right about the game we had played, and none of us had played the same game.
The three passes came out of that argument, and the site came out of realising that no publication we read was reporting the difference. Six years later the method has barely changed. We have only added the subtitle note, after a reader pointed out that partial subtitles and full subtitles are not remotely the same promise.
Who reads what
Founding editor · horror, adventure
Spent eleven years as a location sound recordist for television before this, which is where the fixed-level habit comes from. Reads the horror and adventure titles, writes the opening notes, and keeps the correction log. Will not play anything with jump scares after nine in the evening.
Reader · strategy, shooters, role-playing
Came from quality assurance at a mid-sized studio and has a long memory for interfaces that assume you can hear them. Takes the longest readings, including the forty-one hours of Marrowfield, and maintains the comparison-section checklist that keeps our passes aligned.
Reader · racing, puzzle · desk manager
Trained as an acoustician and now splits her week between readings and keeping the site itself simple — the plain HTML, the absence of trackers and the local fonts are all her doing. Handles everything that arrives through the contact form.
Money
All three of us hold other work. Held Note is funded out of our own pockets, and the only recurring costs are the domain, the hosting, and the games themselves. There is no advertising, no affiliate arrangement, no sponsorship, no press-trip attendance, and no paid placement of any kind on this site or in the reading queue.
We accept no review copies. Every game in the listening room was bought at retail price on the platform named in the reading, and if a publisher sends us a code we reply politely and buy the game anyway. This is not a moral position so much as a practical one: the three passes take long enough that we need to be free to abandon a game without owing anyone an explanation.
“The moment somebody else pays for the copy, the clock starts running on the review. We would rather keep the clock.”
Corrections
Corrections are appended to the bottom of the affected reading with the date and a plain description of what changed. We do not silently edit a sentence after publication, and we do not remove a reading because a developer disagrees with it. If a game receives a substantial audio patch we may publish a second reading; when that happens both stay online, dated, so you can see what changed and when.
Two corrections have been issued since 2019. Both are visible on their original pages in the listening room. If you believe a third is needed, write in and say which sentence and why.
