Respawn Signal — Est. 2021
Games that
matter
get read differently.
A Decade of Soulslike: What the Genre Actually Changed
Ten years after Dark Souls reshaped difficulty discourse, the more interesting question isn't whether punishing games are good — it's what that conversation revealed about how we'd been letting games apologise for themselves.
Why Open Worlds Feel Empty Even When They're Full
CultureThe Immersive Sim Isn't Coming Back — It Never Left
Dispatches published
Words in the archive
Editorial voices
Review scores ever published
Latest Dispatches
All dispatches
A Decade of Soulslike: What the Genre Actually Changed
The more interesting question isn't whether punishing games are good — it's what the discourse revealed about how we'd been letting games apologise for themselves.
Why Open Worlds Feel Empty Even When They're Full
Density of content isn't the same thing as density of meaning. The games that actually feel inhabited tend to have far fewer things in them.
The Immersive Sim Isn't Coming Back — It Never Left
Every few years someone announces the revival of the immersive sim. The premise is wrong. The DNA never went anywhere; it just moved into structures we stopped calling by that name.
On games and what they mean
What this is
We don't do scores. We don't do hype.
Respawn Signal started because we were tired of coverage that treated games like product launches. Not every game deserves a thousand-word analysis, but the ones that do rarely get it. We write long when it's worth it and short when it isn't.
Two writers, based in Strasbourg. No algorithm feeding the editorial calendar. No PR relationships to protect. When we write about something, it's because we have something specific to say about it.
Read our editorial approach →Common questions
Because a number compresses a 2,000-word argument into something a reader can disagree with without reading the argument. We'd rather write something that holds up for someone who finished the game six months ago than something that helps someone decide in the next fifteen minutes.
No. We write when we have something to say. Sometimes a game releases and neither of us has a worthwhile angle on it yet, so we wait, or skip it entirely. The editorial calendar is basically our own interest level, which is either a feature or a bug depending on what you want from a gaming publication.
We're not currently taking external contributions — the publication is intentionally small. If that changes, it'll be noted on the editorial page. For everything else, the contact form is there.
Usually one of two ways: a game does something structurally interesting that we haven't seen articulated well elsewhere, or we finish something and the conversation we want to have about it doesn't seem to exist yet. We also write about older games when something in the present makes them newly legible.