Reviews from a dad who only plays after bedtime.

Hi. I’m a dad in Durban, South Africa with a 7 year old daughter, a full-time job in a tech startup, and a deep love of video games. The catch is that I only get to play once the house finally goes still — usually a tired hour or two between bedtime stories and my own.

That changes how I review games. I don’t have time for grinds. I don’t care about 100% completion. I care about whether a game respects my limited time, whether I’m still thinking about it when I’m making toast the next morning, and whether it’s worth giving up an hour of sleep for.

The Dad Score

Every review ends with a single Dad Score out of 10. It’s a gut number that combines story, gameplay, graphics, replayability, and how dad-friendly the game is — meaning short sessions, easy pause, no FOMO mechanics, no loot box guilt. The breakdown appears at the bottom of every review.

How to read a review

Hero banner, big score, short blurb. If you only have ten seconds, that’s your verdict. The body is for when she stays asleep a bit longer.

The Certificate of Play

Every review ends with a little “Certificate of Play” — a snapshot of exactly how much time the game actually cost me. Total hours, number of sessions, longest single sit-down, first-played and last-played dates, and a personal mastery rating. It’s the receipt that backs up the score: you can see at a glance whether I’m giving you a verdict after 90 minutes or after a full credits roll.

The certificates are generated by Nexus, a unified PC game launcher that pulls my Steam, Epic, GOG and Battle.net libraries into one place and tracks play time across all of them. It’s how I keep an honest log of every session without having to think about it — which is exactly what a tired dad needs. Full disclosure: I built Nexus too. If you want your own play stats and certificates, you can grab Nexus for free.