Indoor Archipelago is a website dedicated to providing curated reviews of indoor culture. This means you’ll find reviews of albums, board games, and video games (maybe even books and films one day) on the site. You’ll also find a podcast (and, in time, maybe video features). Indoor Archipelago focuses on reviewing cultural products that have captured our attention or imagination in some way–in other words, we’re curating a list of things we have enjoyed over the years. If our tastes align, we’ve hopefully helped you separate the wheat from the chaff and discover some new things to enjoy. And if our tastes don’t align, sorry.
Indoor Archipelago was created in 2017 by an armchair traveler from Fort Collins, Colorado named Sam and features contributions from his friends and family.
Our Reviews Theory
You’ll notice one conspicuous absence from our collected reviews–namely, a scoring system. At Indoor Archipelago, we believe that the most interesting criticism is rooted in the personal. As such, we’re not trying to make sweeping pronouncements about what is good and what is bad. Each review represents a single person’s experience with a piece of art. This is a subjective field, after all. Mapping a score to that experience only adds a false sheen of empiricism. There are plenty of sites out there offering numeric assessment–and even sites aggregating those assessments to try to identify the collective opinion. So if that’s what you want, you need a different archipelago.
Furthermore, in recognizing that all reviews are essentially personal narratives, we believe the reviewer’s voice is central. We don’t try to standardize or editorialize it away–instead we leave it there in full view. By reading, you’ll get to know a little bit more about each reviewer. Our lives, our tastes, and interests. We’re not going to try and wow you with our encyclopedic knowledge of each scene or always stay at the bleeding edge. Nor will we rely on needlessly bloated webs of analogical reasoning–we ought to be able to describe something in a way that stands more or less on its own.
When it comes to games, we won’t lead you through the full details of rules or gameplay mechanisms, but instead will attempt to provide a brief overview. Our goal is to give you an idea of what it feels like to play the game, the types of decisions you’ll encounter, and the overall flow. That said, games often come with a historical of fictional context in ways that albums don’t, so please forgive us if we get sidetracked into related tangents now and then.
Ultimately, we understand that you’re going to form a relationship with us based upon the words we write. As such, we’ll do our best to honor your investment of time. Thanks for stopping by.