How we actually land on a review score

People ask how we pick numbers, so here's the honest version. A score is our gut feeling after real playtime, written down and argued about until it feels right.

We weigh a few things: how the controls feel, whether the game respects your time, and how likely we are to reopen it a week later. That last one is the tiebreaker more often than not.

We don't do perfect scores. Every game has a rough edge somewhere, and pretending otherwise would make the whole scale useless. A 4.7 from us means we genuinely loved it, warts and all.

Two of us play every game we score. If we disagree hard, we keep playing until we find common ground or we split the difference and say so in the review.