What does this site do?

A lot of sites talk about abstract 'quality' of games. They talk about the quality of the prose, the quality of the graphics, the quality of the design. We measure games as we might measure purity of metal or fuel efficiency, and anything less than perfection is a moral failing - a moral failing to have released, and a moral failing to purchase.

This site holds a diferent view. The fact that a game gets released at all is a minor miracle. Games are a luxury work of art, and almost all games have some value. They're labors of months or years of time by dozens or hundreds of people, and even the worst game has something to say, something to show for its effort.

The question this site answers is not "is this game correct?" We want to answer "is it worth the price you can get the game for, right now?"

What do we measure?

The weakness of the Steam method is that the only metric it measures is a simple up-down. This measure are hidden in abstract phrasing (did you know that "Mostly Positive" is worse than both "Positive" and "Very Positive", despite being a stronger intensifier than "Very?" That's not obvious anywhere!). Everything else is hidden in the plaintext content, where you are encouraged to either be highly verbose (consider the plague of steam reviews where there are hundreds of checkboxes) or highly acerbic (and vulgar) in order to earn Steam reward points.

Rather than rely on text reviews, we measure five values. Graphics, Sounds, and Controls measure both artistic direction and technical thoroughness. Immersion measures how the game introduces you to its depths, whether that's in complex mechanics or in detailed lore. And Style measures how original, put-together, and cool it feels.

We take these values and present a normalized percentile ranking. These are presented in a nice, easy-to-scan page, with rarity lines. Because they're normalized, values from 0% to 100% inclusive (rounded to the nearest percentile) are presented; this isn't a site where you have to memorize that (say) 5.5 is about the baseline all but malware games earn, and 7.5 is the best you can hope for. We also color-, size-, and weight-code those scores; if you see a Epic Purple, a Legendary Orange, a Mythic Gold, or an Ultra Magenta when you're scanning a game, you'll know that people think there's something special about the game.