How we score games, and why our numbers mean something

People ask us all the time how we land on a rating, so here's the honest version. It's not a formula spat out by a spreadsheet — it's a conversation after real play time.

We weigh a few things heavily: how the controls feel, how respectful the game is of your time, and whether we actually wanted to keep playing. A pretty game with clumsy controls loses points fast.

We also try to judge each game against its own goals. A cozy fishing game like Big Bass Bonanza isn't competing with a sprawling RPG, so we rate it on how well it does the thing it set out to do.

Nothing under about 3.8 makes it onto the site, because if a game is genuinely bad, we'd rather just not cover it than waste your time reading about it.

The number is a shorthand. The words underneath it are where the real review lives, so please read those too.