Hello, everyone. Hopefully this summer has been treating you well! It's been a while since you've heard from us—things have been hectic, to say the least. A lot has happened since our first review was posted in March of last year, but we're ready to jump back once more into the fray. With our return, we have a few announcements to make.

The first order of business is our new schedule. When we began posting over a year ago, we had grand ideas for Couple's Kitchen. We wanted to post a review every Saturday, eventually venture out into a YouTube channel, and amongst other things, we strove to set basic requirements for each review. For instance, having a certain amount of playtime put into a game before writing about it or simply completing it in its entirety. That last part is still important to us, but with all the other undue pressure we were putting on our shoulders, we quickly dropped the ball at every pass. After all, this blog has only ever been a fun little project for us—Chef C is a fiction writer and an aspiring indie game developer, and Sous Chef G is a dutiful university student. So it's not like we have that kind of time to spare.

We were also unprepared for how daunting it would be when a developer actually reached out to us to write about and promote their games. Don't get the wrong idea here—we have always been tremendously grateful and so honoured to review games for other people. However, we have never really known what the industry standard is. Do we review these games as soon as possible, no matter what? Because that's what we did. Are we meant to hold these games on a pedestal because they were offered to us, despite how we really feel about them? Now that's something we couldn't do. Our reviews have always been our honest opinions, but unfortunately because of our uncertainty with how long we should take to put pen to paper, we sometimes were unable to give games the time and focus they deserved. On top of that, some of the games we promptly reviewed were newly released and have since updated quite a bit, often even fixing the bugs and flaws we found in them.

That brings us to the new schedule. Starting on September 2nd, we will resume writing reviews and posting approximately four each month. On the first Friday of every month, we will post a review for our "First Falcom Friday" to spotlight the titles from one of our favourite game developers: Nihon Falcom. Throughout the month, we will also be posting a regular review every fortnight. Then, on the last day of each month, we will do a "Last of Month Re-Review," where we go back to revisit every one of our previously reviewed games and update our thoughts on them. This gives us a second chance to take our time with the games we rushed through before. That being said, any of the games offered to us by developers going forward will be placed onto our schedule as any other game would. If you would like to know more, read about it here[the-couples-kitchen.blogspot.com].

You may be wondering: what happens when a regular update overlaps with one of our dedicated review days? The plan as of right now is to post both updates. However, if this ever becomes overwhelming, we will prioritise the dedicated review over the regular update. Additionally, we have no qualms about posting on holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, etc. Although, we do have two days that are off limits: June 24 and September 23. Should a review ever fall upon either of those days, then we will skip the entire week and resume posting the next Friday.

The last thing we want to bring up is our new site. Because Steam only allows curators to post a short blurb for games, we've been using tumblr to post our full reviews. Our tumblr has been a great resource so far, though it has been in a state of "we'll fix it later" since its inception. It would be a bit time-consuming to get it to where we want it to be, so we're migrating the "main blog" over to Blogger, which is a bit easier to manage in terms of layout. We will still be posting all our news and whatnot on the old blog for the people who follow us there, but we have no plans at the moment to redesign our tumblr. Again, it's not going anywhere. You're still welcome to like or reblog our posts there, but our curator page will begin redirecting to the Blogger site instead.

All in all, we hope that these new changes will prove to be a refreshing move in the right direction for us. Thank you to all the developers who have reached out to us in the past, and for the continued support of our followers both on Steam and on tumblr. We are eager to get back into the kitchen and start cooking up some more content. Until then, we will be looking forward to when you return to peruse the updated menu.

- Couple's Kitchen