They asked for a game you've never heard of. Type it in — we'll tell you what's actually in it, in plain language.
Free to read. No account, no email. · 700+ games and counting.
Then pool their time. One budget across Switch, Steam, PlayStation and PC — it locks every screen at zero.
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Know what's in it
Proximity voice carries any nearby player's live microphone audio. It is not moderated, and there is no text chat.
How we rate thisWe describe the game's design, never the people who play it.
Tag-style chasing with no combat and no injury shown.
No account, no email.
Control how long
Playing — Steam
Time's up for today
Bedtime at 8:30
Switch, Steam, PlayStation, Xbox and PC.
"He played Helldivers for two hours" tells you nothing if you don't know what Helldivers is. Balanced Play rates the games your kids actually play, so "two hours of Helldivers" finally means something — whether they're on one console or six.
Free to read, no account needed.
A cartoon, bloodless last-one-standing shooter. The combat is mild — the real story is who your kid plays with and what the game keeps nudging them to buy.
In the game
Who can reach them
Open the Gameplay tab and see what each kid played, where, and for how long — with the content notes attached. Per title, not just a device total.
Built for parents who are done playing whack-a-mole with screen limits.
Minutes on the Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, Steam and Windows PC phones and tablets all draw from the same daily total. No more per-device loopholes.
Enforcement is bound to the account, not your router — so it survives a phone hotspot or a night at a friend's house.
Kid asks for more? Approve or deny with one tap. Bonus time is added once to the shared time budget — no stacking, no negotiating.
Set a nightly window and every linked screen pauses — homework hours and bedtime, handled everywhere at once.
Sign in with Google or Apple and connect each platform's own parental controls. We never see or store your passwords.
Eighteen content areas — violence, language, sexual content, substances, spending pressure and more — plus eight ways other players can reach your kid. Not one vague age letter.
Three steps, about five minutes. After that you set the rules here, not on each device.
Link the platforms your kids play on. You log in to each; we ride on its own parental controls.
Pick a number of minutes and a bedtime window. That's the whole rulebook.
Every few minutes we total up play across devices and hold the line — locking every screen when the day's time is spent.
iPhone & iPad can't be metered by any third-party app — Apple keeps Screen Time on the device. Here's how to lock iOS to request-only instead →
The stuff you're Googling at 9pm.
Balanced Play pools play time from every linked platform — Switch, Steam, Xbox and PlayStation — into a single daily budget. Set one number of minutes, and it drains no matter which device your kid picks up. When it's spent, every linked screen locks together. No per-device settings to juggle.
Because each device counts its time on its own. A one-hour limit on the Switch, the phone and the PC isn't one hour — it's three. The free controls built into the Switch, Xbox and iPhone can't see each other, so a kid just hops to the next device when one runs out. Balanced Play replaces those separate timers with a single shared budget, so there's no other screen to switch to.
With Apple, Google and console controls, no — each ecosystem tracks its own time and nothing pools across brands. That's the gap Balanced Play fills: one daily total that spans every device your child plays on, regardless of who made it.
Yes — that's the part most tools miss. Balanced Play rates the games your kids play across eighteen content areas (violence, language, sexual content, substances, dark themes, spending pressure and more) and scores the social side separately: who can voice-chat or message your child, and whether there's a real-money store. So instead of "two hours on something called Helldivers," you get what's actually in it.
Yes. The whole review library is free and open — browse every rated game, search for the one your kid is asking about, and read the full breakdown without signing up. An account is for the other half: pooling their play time across platforms and matching each game against the line you've set for your family.
They're built to earn it. Each game is rated by several independent passes, and then challenged by separate reviews looking for anything overstated or missed — so no single opinion decides what you see, and the "worth knowing" notes come straight from the scores rather than being written from scratch. We describe what's in a game, never who's in it. When we're not confident about a title, we say so instead of guessing.
The whole design removes the usual escape routes. There's no second device to shift to, because they all share one budget. And the lock is bound to your child's account, not your home Wi-Fi — so it holds on a phone hotspot or at a friend's house, and doesn't vanish on a reboot.
Yes. Enforcement is bound to the device and account, not your home network — so the lock follows your child even on a phone hotspot or a night at a friend's house.
Never. You sign in with Google or Apple and connect each platform's own parental controls. Balanced Play rides on top of those — it never sees or stores your passwords.
Live now: Nintendo Switch, Steam, Xbox and PlayStation. A router-based option (for devices with no controls of their own) and an Android app are on the way.
One daily budget across their Switch, Steam, PlayStation, Xbox and Windows PC. Set it up in about five minutes.
Free for your first 7 days. Cancel any time from account settings — no email, no phone call.