I love Pacific Drive, and have actually been coming back to it periodically over the past year, whenever I need to kill some time. I'm not usually a trophy (a.k.a. "achievement") hunter, but I will go for them if it's not too far out of my way. My first playthrough of the campaign earned me all but a handful of the trophies in the game, and the remainder seemed fairly achievable. After all, there is no trophy for doing things like "collect all Frequency Files" or the other documents, or for completing the in-game encyclopedia. Stuff like that is a grind that I would never bother to do. So as I've been playing the game's epilogue, I've been trying to earn the few remaining trophies.

There was one trophy, however, that was driving me up the wall. If you've played Pacific Drive, and made any effort to try to get all the trophies/achievements (or you've spent a lot of time on Pacific Drive forums and subreddit), then you probably know what trophy I'm talking about. That's right, the one trophy that looked like it might stand between me and a Platinum was the "Watch out for hop-ons!" trophy.

Like many other players, I was one of the unfortunate ones for whom this trophy seemed to refuse to pop.

"Watch Out For Hop-Ons!" is the one trophy that
stands between Pacific Drive players and a Platinum.

I spent hours driving around various junctions with various bunnies and hares attached to my Remnant (usually with a YouTube video playing on my phone, so that I wouldn't feel like I was completely wasting my time), but the trophy just wouldn't pop.

I even tried the "pause the game while driving with an attached bunny" recommendation that showed up in so many forum and Reddit responses, even though Ironwood Studios has insisted that pausing doesn't trigger the achievement.

I planned entire runs around going through as many junctions as possible that had bunnies and/or hares listed in the anomalies.

But this trophy just would not unlock...

... That is, until last week.

A few months ago, the Jimquisition had an episode about gamers criticizing game reviews and reviewers for "not finishing the game". James/Stephanie Sterling correctly points out that this complaint with a game review is most often employed to deflect from valid criticism of a game -- usually because the person complaining likes the game and gets overly defensive in response to any criticism. While I agree with James/Stephanie Sterling's response in the original video, I also have strong feelings about other practical concerns regarding whether a video game reviewer should need to finish a game in order to review it. As an amateur game critic and YouTube essayist, this particular brand of attack against reviews and reviewers is relevant to me, my gaming habits, and my content creation, so I hope that I have a worthwhile perspective about this topic.

As for the underlying issue of whether a game reviewer should have to finish a game before reviewing it: the answer to that question is a resounding, absolute, unequivocal "no".

As an amateur, who plays games and creates written reviews and video essays, all on my free time, outside of a full-time job, I cannot play every game to end credits -- let alone to 100% completion or a Platinum Trophy.

And you know what? Neither do most players.

Go ahead, take a look at the achievement or trophy metrics for any game you play. You'll probably find that the achievement for beating almost any game will be owned by well below half of all players, and might actually be less than a quarter of players for many longer games like RPGs. And while there are certainly some players who play offline and don't report their stats to Steam, Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo, the achievement stats for the vast, overwhelming majority of games is very closely representative of the population, since most players don't go to the trouble of playing "off the grid".

Finishing a game is a relatively rare thing for the average gamer to do, which means the average gamer isn't going to care if a particular review finished the game or not. That average gamer is probably not going to see the end of the game anyway, so a review that only covers the first half or so of the game will still be perfectly adequate and informative for such a player.

Most games are completed by well under than half of all players.

So as an "average gamer" who plays as a hobby and writes reviews and other content on the side, as an un-paid amateur, not finishing a game is good enough for me too. Yes, I will try to finish the main campaign of a game that I review, if it's possible and practical. For most shorter games (with campaigns less than 20 hours), I do, indeed, almost always hit the end credits before I publish a review. It will usually take me a few weeks to do it, which is why, even if I bought the game on release day, my reviews will still be several weeks late, or longer. Most of my reviews are practically retro reviews by the time I get them out.