Buried Treasure exists to highlight great, interesting, bizarre or downright silly games that you’d otherwise likely miss.
The number of independent games coming out is literally impossible to keep up with. On Steam alone 20-30 games are released every single day, and that’s before you consider Itch.io, Humble Store, Epic Store, Switch, iOS, Android, and on and on. No site, no matter how well-read and well-funded, can possibly keep up. This is a problem made worse when most of those read and funded sites don’t even bother to try. And the casualties of this are many.
At Buried Treasure I intend to save all I can. This site is my attempt to entirely focus on this work, telling a dedicated audience about the games they’d otherwise never hear of, with the additional hope that the major sites will will remember my grizzled old name, trust my recommendations, and plunder my discoveries with abandon. I want good games to be played, and good developers to get paid. That sounds catchy. That should be a slogan.
If you have a good game, you really should tell me! Please email hello@buried-treasure.org with links, code, etc. (Please only finished/early access games.) For now I’m going to focus on PC, Switch and Android.
I absolutely flat-out cannot guarantee coverage, and if this project goes as well as I hope, I might not be able to reply. But I will look at everything that gets sent, whether it’s for 14 bewildered seconds, or obsessively every day for weeks.
About John Walker
Hello. I’ve been a games critic for the last 20 years, beginning my career as a regular on PC Gamer, while also writing for EDGE, Gamesmaster, Eurogamer and most other places too.
In 2007, along with Jim Rossignol, Alec Meer and Kieron Gillen, I co-created PC gaming wundersite Rock Paper Shotgun. Over twelve years I battled injustices, wrote jokes about poo, and most of all sought out fantastic little games no one else was noticing. That legacy continues on at RPS after my timely death. And I’ll be frequently linking out that way, since they still rather pleasingly revive me to review such games every now and then.
Why Patreon?
To do this properly, I need to be able to devote a significant amount of my time to Buried Treasure. So I’m trying Patreon.
Since I left RPS in April 2019, I’ve not really had a regular income. That was fine for a bit, because we sold the business a couple of years before, and that kept me going. But it turns out I might continue existing for decades to come. And also a child costs a fortune.
I’d really love it if I could go some way to supporting my family via the magic of telling excellent people about excellent games. And the grim reality is, the broader gaming press is not willing to pay writers for reviews that won’t bring in big numbers. A game no one’s heard of yet is not good SEO. That bums me out, but I get it too, because they’re businesses, and they have staff to pay.
So what if, instead, a dedicated audience paid a regular contribution to keep such reviews happening? It’s possible it could work, especially if those people told other people. For more details about how the Patreon works, check the page over there.
RSS Feed?
Just for you: //buried-treasure.org/feed/