and Roger: You Can’t Measure a Journey in Hours

Released in 2025 with barely a whisper, and Roger is one of those games that quietly digs a trench inside you. Since June 2026, it has also been available on Switch 2 in a dedicated version that adds mouse mode support, a welcome addition that works particularly well.

A lot of reviews take a very simple approach to and Roger: just play it. I can only agree. Don’t read anything else, and above all, don’t go peeking at its Wikipedia page.

Even hinting at the game’s themes, which begin to surface fairly early in its roughly hour-long playthrough, feels like a crime. This is not even really about spoilers. It is about damaging the experience itself.

If you haven’t played it yet, play it. I’ve said that already, haven’t I?

An experience that belongs to games

and Roger opens up an interesting conversation about the medium we love.

Plenty of people will frame it as an “artistic” vision of what a videogame can be, a kind of debate that has never especially thrilled me. I find it slippery and not all that useful: if videogames can be art for you, fine. If they are simply entertainment, that is fine too.

What and Roger shows, though, is something more specific: some kinds of experiences are inseparable from the medium that carries them.

It is very hard to imagine having the experience of and Roger through a book, a comic, or a TV series. Of course, most stories can probably be moved from one medium to another in some form, but some make that journey more easily than others. And every adaptation inevitably takes something away and adds something else.

A TV series of and Roger would simply be a different thing.

What is playtime really worth?

The other thought and Roger left me with is about the value of time spent playing.

After the credits rolled, my Switch 2 listed it as “played for a little while,” the standard label Nintendo uses for games under two hours. Almost as if to imply, not even all that subtly, that the game mattered less to you because you spent less time with it.

and Roger proves exactly the opposite.

I played it for a short time, yes. But that time was unforgettable.

We cannot compare our experiences with games purely on the axis of time.

Play and Roger, and you will realise that those not-quite-sixty minutes can carry an emotional density that easily outweighs a game where the counter reads 250 hours.

Not because those 250 hours are worth less, or were less beautiful, less intense, or less enjoyable. Simply because time, on its own, says very little about the value of an experience. When the credits of and Roger start to roll, that number on the playtime counter suddenly feels much less important.

Besides, if you think about it, are we really sure the game ends after those sixty minutes?

You will carry and Roger with you in the hours that follow, in the evenings that follow, maybe even in the days that follow.

And isn’t that part of the experience too?