About

Ridge Play started as a group chat where a few friends kept recommending games to each other and arguing about touch controls. At some point we figured we might as well write it down properly, so here we are. Every game on the site gets played by a real person for at least a few hours before a single word goes up.

We care about the stuff reviews usually skip: how hot your phone gets, whether the virtual buttons cover your thumbs, how aggressive the notifications are, and how the thing behaves on an older mid-range device instead of the latest flagship.

Games get picked in a pretty simple way. Something gets buzz, someone on the team is curious, or a reader emails us. We then play it on at least two phones, usually one newer and one a couple of years old, and compare notes.

Nobody pays us to feature a game and we don't sell anything. If something is dull we say so, and if something surprised us we get a bit too excited about it. That's the whole deal.

Markus Hoffmann — Markus has been reviewing mobile and handheld games for over a decade and still keeps a drawer full of old phones for testing. He drinks too much coffee and has strong opinions about on-screen joysticks.