"Eating a big steak dinner is great. Being forced to eat 30 steak dinners in the span of a week approaches torture."

This is the best analogy I've heard for describing the "hardship" of reviewing an epic-length game on a tight embargo deadline (I think Ben Kuchera was the one to first mention this great saying to me, and it's definitely stuck).

I put "hardship" in quotes, of course, because even the most arduous game review assignment isn't nearly as bad as the vast majority of jobs out there. As another famous game journalism saying goes, "the worst part about this job is that you can't complain about it" (or, my personal refrain, "It beats the salt mines").

That said, putting 40, 60, even 80 hours into a single game in the space of a week can be a specific difficulty of this job. It's a problem that's pretty unique to game criticism, too. A film critic only needs a few hours to watch a work before commenting. A TV reviewer can binge-watch the first six episodes of a new drama in an afternoon. A music reviewer can listen to a new album dozens of times in a single day to capture its nuances. The only thing that really comes close is a book reviewer facing a thousand-page tome, but even at a page a minute average, such a book can be consumed in about 17 hours.