Most gaming sites review games. We review whether they are worth your evening.
If you have a job, a family, or both, the maths changes. A ninety-hour open world is not automatically better value than a twelve-hour game you will actually finish.
Our story
Trust is the product
Ctrl Alt Dad started from a simple frustration: reviews are written as though the reader has an empty weekend and an unlimited budget. Most people reading them have neither.
So the framing here is different. Games and technology are the subject, but the actual product is trust — a verdict you can act on without doing your own research afterwards.
That means saying when something is not worth full price, when a game is excellent but demands more time than you have, and when we simply do not know.
The rules we hold ourselves to
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Be real
We never fake experience. If we have not used it properly, we do not review it.
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Family comes first
This site is built around real life, not the other way round. That is the whole point of it.
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Respect your time
TL;DR at the top, the practical answers before the prose, and no padding to hit a word count.
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Say when we do not know
An honest "we have not tested that" is worth more than a confident guess.
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Only recommend what we believe in
Affiliate links never change a score, and we say when a link earns us something.
Who writes this
Everything here is written by people who play it
Dad
Founder & Editor
Started Ctrl Alt Dad after realising most reviews assume you have a free weekend. Writes every review here, and plays everything on the same limited evenings you do.
The Weekly Manifest
One email a week. What is worth your time, and what is not.