Reading this journal means proceeding under the terms below. They describe what our reviews claim, what our attempt counts and retry timings actually measure, how the work may be reused, and where our responsibility stops.
Every page here is a judgement. A mark expresses our view of whether a game's difficulty is fair and instructive, and readers will reasonably reach different conclusions from the same figures. Nothing published here is a warranty about how a game will behave for you.
Attempt counts, plateau points, retry timings and inconsistency logs describe our own playthroughs, on the builds available at the time, on our own hardware. Another player will need a different number of attempts. A patch may change a retry loop, remove an inconsistency we recorded, or add an assist option that did not exist when we tested.
Our retry timings are frame-counted at sixty frames per second on our own system, as described on the method page. Different hardware, storage or display settings will produce different figures, and readers should treat ours as a reference point rather than a specification.
Where we describe a death as unaccountable, that means we could not explain it from our log and our footage. It is a statement about the limits of our own records as much as about the game, and a reader with a different reading of the same footage is entitled to it.
Our finding that deliberate breaks recover progress is a description of our data, not medical or psychological advice. Anybody may reasonably play in whatever pattern suits them, and nothing on this site should be read as an instruction about how to spend an evening.
Short quotations in articles, videos, reviews and discussion are welcome provided Hard Mode Journal is credited and the quotation is not trimmed in a way that reverses its meaning. Reproducing a whole review, translating one without permission, or using this journal's text as material for commercial machine learning systems is not permitted.
Marks and counted figures may not appear in advertising, on storefront pages or in promotional material of any kind. A mark separated from its attempt log conveys nothing a reader can act on, and it misrepresents both the finding and the work behind it.
All photographs, illustrations and the glyph on this site were produced for it and remain ours. None are screenshots and none should be presented as depictions of any game. Names of games, studios, publishers and hardware belong to their owners and appear here for identification and critical commentary; no affiliation or endorsement exists in either direction.
This journal sells nothing. There is no shop, subscription, membership, donation route or advertising inventory, so no order, payment, refund or delivery can arise between us. Any approach claiming to trade under this name is unconnected to the journal.
The site is provided as it stands. We give no undertaking that it will remain reachable, that older logs will stay published, or that internal links will survive a future reorganisation. Reviews may be corrected, annotated, re-tested after a patch or withdrawn at editorial discretion.
To the extent the applicable law permits, we accept no liability for loss or damage arising from reliance on anything published here, including games bought or avoided on the strength of a mark. An attempt log informs a decision; it does not make one.
A page may occasionally reference material published by somebody else. Those sites lie outside our control, we make no claim about their accuracy or continued availability, and their own terms govern you from the moment you follow the link.
This page is revised as the journal's practice develops. The text present when you load the page is the text that applies, and continuing to read afterwards means proceeding under the current version rather than an earlier one.
Statutory consumer protections are unaffected by anything above. Where the law in your jurisdiction grants rights that cannot be limited by agreement, those rights apply in full, and the clauses here operate only within whatever margin that law leaves.
