05 Sep 2026 22 min read Blog

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There is a multiverse theory that suggests every decision someone makes splits off a multiverse, in which the timeline you occupy is the one where you made the decision you made, and somewhere in the space-time cosmos is a timeline in which you made a different decision. Billions upon trillions of separate versions of reality that exist as consequences of decisions made every day. Let's put a pin in that for a few minutes.

Recently, social media has been posting about a website called VideogameCritics that is meant to assess, on a number of axes, the "trustworthiness" of critical reviews on any given videogame, as well as being a living document of reviews on a game to account for changes over time. To be a little reductive, it's a MetaCritic-alike with rolling updates, which uses player review recommendation percentages to determine true accuracy, then weighs other sources against consensus. It professes to have a transparent scoring process, but the algorithms used to weigh scores are inevitably and inescapably biased by intentional decisions made before any math was committed to code, including using player reviews as the foundational text on which creators and publications are weighed and judged.

But more than the technical, mathematical, or social quibbles I have with the entire exercise, I've been thinking a lot about the art of reviews in general. Without getting too deep into the weeds about the nature of art as being of its time, in conversation with its audience, influenced by its contemporaries and influences, and how its shape is at times decided by its limitations than its intentions, the idea of any given review having any single truth gives me so much friction. I cannot imagine any intention to capture a universal truth which doesn't leave it violently sanded down by the effort to bottle it, so it ends up a smooth cylinder preserved in glass, a fraction of its former shape and with all of its details carved away to rattle fitfully against the walls.

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A game review is published generally shortly before or on release of a videogame. It typically describes the game in informational terms, so the reader knows who the developer is, who the publisher is, and whether or not the game is part of a series. Most of this is boilerplate information, just enough to give readers a sense of context or some foundation for expectations before the review begins in earnest.

The bulk of the review is often dedicated to description of a game's narrative, mechanics, and events. Each of these are summarized mechanically and anecdotally, and related to genre features in other games to give a point of comparison. It talks about what other games this game feels like, how it feels different, and why those differences are important to this particular game, or the genre, or to explain the ways this game departs from genre or its series in some important way.

From the writer side, this kind of review is the easiest to write. It's probably the closest approximation that any art can have to a form letter, and the format is familiar enough to reach reader expectations. At first blush, this feels like the optimized form of review VideogameCritics is looking for, something that is exactly what it needs to be with no excess. A string of check-boxes to hit, make enough comparisons that the sterility of text isn't too remote for the reader to make sense of, provide just enough color and set dressing that the text doesn't read too much like something LLM-generated, and dust your hands off and collect your paycheck.

But even in this fill-in-the-box format, the color and set dressing feel like the important parts. Those are the things that make the review really sing for the reader, and without them you end up with something strictly technical—a document that outlines how many weapons are in a game, how many levels the game has, whether or not a game includes certain game modes, but no opinion on the value of those things.

And in finding the right words for these metaphorical splash colors and decorative wall-hangings is where the criteria starts to fall apart.

Imagine for a moment, that you could travel to another multiverse. One in which I decided to still write this piece, but I decided to write it differently. It is, at a glance, similar enough to the framing in adjacent multiverses. Each of these multiversal versions of myself are trying to grapple with a different vector of the problem. How can a single review cover enough to encompass a general consensus, built not just on release but that stretches out to what games will be weeks, months, or years later?

More than the technical, mathematical, or social quibbles I have with the idea, a game is also a static moment. Without getting too deep into the weeds about the nature of art as being of its time, in conversation with its audience, influenced by its contemporaries and influences, and how it's shape is at times decided by its limitations than its intentions, the idea of any given review having any single truth gives me so much friction. Imagine, for a moment, you're assembling a ship in a glass bottle. It's a hobby that gives you a little piece of decorative art at the end, but one that's dating itself. Short of sailing enthusiasts and historians, there is no real place in modern society for a ship of that kind. It is no longer the dominant form of passenger or mercantile travel, so you end up with a dinosaur trapped in a bottle.

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A review to a game is one that captures a moment as well as an object. A review is more akin to an instant photo—developed in the camera, labeled in permanent marker on the edge of a chipped wooden picnic table, and stored in a plastic binder to be found in a few decades later.

It captures the experience of playing the game where it is, fixed in time. The shadow of games that came just before still sit in the mind. Can you see a world where Genshin Impact releases without the recent success of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild? The pattern that games in general have weigh in, making so many of the aspects of the game feel the way that it does. The culture that the game is immersed in do their part. In what world pre-GamerGate is there a social media outcry that a Wolfenstein game includes violence against nazis? The game is in conversation with its place on the timeline. A game like Mass Effect would have looked vastly different immediately following the success of Halo than it did releasing in the era of Gears of War.

There is no review independent of the culture and conversation that surround it. A game is in conversation with so many things, concurrently, that you can't pull its parts out and weigh them on a scale without losing some part of it. Trying to assemble them back in a vacuum is stripping the game of its context, and you lose the meaning of it. A game like Spec Ops: The Line exists only in a world where Call of Duty and Battlefield are some of the largest and most financially and culturally successful shooters in the world.

If we were to strictly speak to Spec Ops: The Line on its merits as a string of mechanics, it would be at best an average game. The actual gunplay isn't offensive enough to turn players off of it, but what it does for shooters is largely forgettable. It did most of its work as a piece of art, itself a criticism of the military shooter genre that had dominated the gaming landscape for years.

But then we're getting into the weeds of art again, aren't we?

Imagine for a moment you could travel to another multiverse. To a games culture that views games primarily through the lens of art, rather than as an entertainment medium. The inherent expectations change, and with them, even the idea of consensus feels like a failure of the art rather than something to be lauded.

It's more than the technical, mathematical, or social quibbles I have with the idea of any art being universal. Art is built to capture a lot of things—it captures a sense of time, it captures emotions and anxieties, it courts friction over the course of its exploration, it tries to reach something meaningful in whatever method it can use. Whether that's through discomfort, through joy, through pain, through familiarity, or through something indescribable. Imagine, for a moment, you figure out a way to bottle your emotions—that you could package the feeling of experiencing true love, or you could make a poison that imbues a drink with becoming depressed, or there was a way to temporarily store elated euphoria. I cannot for even a moment imagine these bottles as being anything other than colorful, luminescent, textured, and extremely identifiable. Surely whatever is in those bottles couldn't possibly look like just a vial of water, right?

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If I asked a room full of people what a The Legend of Zelda game looks like, I'm not sure I'd be able to package the answers into something coherent.

The actual mechanics of Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker, and Twilight Princess all exist on the same continuum, but I'm not sure any of these games really fit together aesthetically. There's a consistent texture that ties the series together, a mouthfeel that's really easy to pick up with just a few minutes of play, but the visible components are a little bit harder to pack away in the same box. As long as it doesn't look bad, maybe that's good enough? Let the game's mechanics carry the rest of the weight.

A game like Hyrule Warriors illustrates that well enough. The game has enough of the visual language of a general The Legend of Zelda game that any given screenshot is probably enough to cement its place in the idiom, but it plays so distantly from any typical Zelda game that it's incomparable. The visual component is all there, but none of the right feel. It's a Musou game.

But I don't think a version of Zelda that discards the visual language would have the right texture either. Twilight Princess is probably about as grungy as Zelda games get, but it never descends into the same kind of grim-dark texture of mud, murk, blood, and grime as a Warhammer game might. If you tried to do so with full commitment, I don't think the result would be a Zelda game. You'd get something like one, but the game itself would feel too different to qualify. It would be a game that checked the boxes, but didn't understand the assignment.

I don't think there's a good word to really summarize it, though. Impish, maybe? In the way fae characters are meant to be tricksters, there is something a little bit impish in the DNA of a Zelda game. The more you lean into the grim and bleak, the further away from that feeling of an entire classroom giggling just before the light-hearted prank actually triggers on the teacher. There is something in there that you need.

It's not explicitly a visual component, but the visuals are a way to get the player where you need them to go. There's an aesthetic component to achieve the desired technical feeling that's pivotal but often out of conscious reach.

Put another way, I couldn't imagine a cozy visual novel with a death metal soundtrack. Even if every other part nails the brief exactly. Without the right aesthetic, something ephemeral gets lost.

Imagine for a moment, you could—Actually, you know the drill by this point, yeah? Alright, so what if videogames hadn't gotten their start as a kind of nerdy medium? What would a gaming magazine look like if it wasn't built on the bones of that twelve to twenty-something middle-class male teenager advertising bracket?

The review that started "If I asked a room full of people" is a deceptively picky one. If I asked a random room full of people what makes a good Zelda game, there's a not insignificant chance that half of the people in that room have never even heard of The Legend of Zelda, much less actually played a game in that series. The majority answer might just be "I don't know." And for those people, what a game reviewer actually thinks about any given Zelda game is almost entirely irrelevant.

So what would a game review look like if it was catered to the general consensus not of "Gamers," but rather people who play video games?

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More than the technical, mathematical, or social quibbles, I'm not the kind of person who plays some videogames. I don't think anyone I've ever worked with professionally in game criticism is either. At least, not with the same mindset and dedication as the audiences of note.

I don't understand Roblox. I'd imagine most people who grew up before it became one of the highest grossing game-platform-engine-community-culture can't really either. I know it has mini-games within it that are particularly popular, and the pay-us-to-pay-us economy inside of it integral to the monetization strategy for the game as a product in capitalism, but I don't get it.

From the outside it looks like an inadequate engine to do most of the things its trying to do from the player perspective. Jumping puzzles with awkward and unintuitive controls for the medium. Customization and monetization systems that disproportionately reward wealth over effort. Community that is so split in so many different ways it's hard for me to even fathom how vast the spread is between any dozen number of games in it, much less for them to have a common enough interest set to all start on the same platform.

But I'm sure there are people so well-read in it that my knowledge gathered over decades of gaming just about everywhere else is functionally worthless. Roblox isn't a game in the way I really understand them. It has mechanics, it has community, it has a culture... But I'm not sure any of it speaks to me in a way that that helps me understand its merits. It mostly looks to me like it's a bad videogame, has an infamous community, and the culture is so predatory on a number of different vectors that what little I know about it is primarily informed by the lawsuits I've heard about it facing.

I cannot meaningfully review Roblox. Anything I have to say about it as a game or as a platform or as a community is too far out of touch for it to be at all meaningful to the people who would, in theory, seek out that kind of review. Anything I learn over the course of trying would be more useful as an exercise to reach people like myself who typically read game reviews but do not typically play Roblox, and would be better framed as an outsider's guide to the game than a game review.

What good would an outsider have at trying unsuccessfully to bridge that gap?

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I don't really play games on my phone. I have a few installed on my phone, I'll occasionally play one when I have a handful of minutes to burn when I'm feeling otherwise directionless, but I'll generally spend a spare 5-10 minutes reading or scrolling than trying to knock out a couple of battles in Slay the Spire.

But there is an audience for smart phone games that I know next to nothing about. It's an audience that, in my mind, is comprised entirely of 50-something real estate agents, white collar workers whittling away the last five minutes of their lunch breaks before going back to their desks, and career bartenders waiting for their next customer on slow nights.

These aren't the sorts of games that get reviewed by reviewers. They're more like games that get found on whatever app store the phone's operating system comes preinstalled with, and their monetization schemes are built on behaviors that don't resemble how a lot of other games do their business.

These games are very fluid, whose primary play verb doesn't change a great deal, but are otherwise constantly seeing updates: new content, new stories, new customizations, new all sorts of things, as long as those novelties keep people playing and spending. It's the kind of update schedule that is more familiar to multiplayer online games than single player ones, at least from my perspective, but that novelty is undoubtedly integral to keeping people on the mobile game treadmill.

For an industry that makes billions in revenue annually, I would assume that there would be an industry of criticism that formed around it. A way to find out what makes Royal Match compelling enough to be the fifth highest grossing game of last year, but there isn't really a culture for that. People who play those games don't read reviews.

What good would an outsider have at trying unsuccessfully to bridge that gap?

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But why don't they read criticism?

Probably because the people who could write those reviews aren't critics, and I would imagine exceptionally few of them have any interest in becoming one. The time it would take to read a review for a match-2 game would probably take longer than the average time you'd spend playing a round of one. And playing a round would almost certainly give you more information about whether or not you'd like it than reading about one.

What even is the point of these reviews then?

A series of bare concrete angles spiral into the distance.

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I can tell you what the stated goals of the weird VideogameCritics site are, it's quite loud about its intentions and drawing its line in the sand about whether or not a critic can be trusted to meet with consensus. I'd rather not re-litigate hundreds of thousands of words on the subject of review scores, game reviews as part of a business, the intersection of games journalism with games marketing, and how all of that sits in the uneasy alliance that inevitably has to form around entertainment journalism. There's too much there to unpack in a single article, or algorithm, or even thought exercise. It doesn't matter how many bottles I have if I'm standing under a waterfall. The bottles are just going to overflow.

But none of that really answers what the point of reviews are.

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Reviews are a kind of consumer report. Their theoretical goal is to tell the audience whether or not a game is worth their time or money. It's a question that doesn't have a definitive answer, because it relies on the person reading to value their money in the way they do, rather than parrot the writer's money-value equation. They can make educated guesses within a review, but there will never be one right answer.

An engineer with a large income but not a lot of free time might value mechanically dense but compact play experiences. For them, there might be more value for money in a roguelike that is short on narrative but packs a great deal of game in a compact space, with a lot of opportunity for variety of experience without a deep time commitment.

Someone with a lot of free time but not a lot of disposable income might prefer a visual novel or a role-playing game, something that is relatively low cost but rich in narrative, and has a lot that can be drawn out of it over time. A story that takes four hundred hours will probably bristle far more to someone who plays in thirty minute increments on nights and weekends compared to someone who plays for a three-hour block in the middle of their afternoon.

You can't really ascribe a consensus on how to view those values, either. There are doubtlessly people out in the world with expensive gaming hardware who exclusively play World of Warcraft, a game released in 2004 whose graphical requirements were unremarkable even on release. There are players who exclusively play games like Minecraft, whose system requirements are astronomical only by virtue of offensively large resource packs and shader mods and dialing render distances as high as the game will let them.

The expected value equation you apply to these four different parts of the gaming audience is vastly different each. There's no way to write a compact and brief review that covers all of the needs of these audiences, and while the consensus was never about them, there's no reason the consensus couldn't be about them.

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But that leads to the question of who a game review is really for.

Because it's not necessarily just people who play videogames a lot. Otherwise there would be more places to meaningfully write about PopCap games, strip mahjong, and whatever Ludo King is. There are of course games one can reasonably expect would be reviewed by games press that land hundreds of hours of playtime, but they are overwhelmingly the minority.

The majority of people who read games criticism are the sorts of people who care about all kinds of games, and are willing to buy just as many. The idea of playing just one game for duration is almost entirely alien to this audience.

So, of course these are the people who care a great deal about review scores, because they're the sorts of people who want to buy countless games in any given year, rather than a small handful that they play repeatedly.

Reviews aren't traditionally for anything else.

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What if, for a moment, we considered a review to be a historical document. A way to take the snapshot of time that a game rests in, and then use it as a lens to understand what a videogame culture was at the period it was written.

But even then, it becomes a question of how to both craft and interpret that kind of writing.

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How much should a retrospective review factor in the generation, culture, and comparative quality of its time when reviewing for a modern audience? Can a review for a sequel exist independent of its predecessor? Should it? How much should a "Best Games of All Time" list review factor in nostalgia to the weighed averages?

For example, if you were tasked with reviewing Soul Calibur for the Sega Dreamcast today, in what lens could you reasonably assess the game? In comparison to its even more dated arcade version, which was the first time a videogame's home version had ever graphically and mechanically surpassed its arcade counterpart? Would you put it in conversation with Soul Calibur VI, the most recent game in its same series? Would you speak to its historical significance, and how a lot of the language it used in 3D fighting game mechanics are still in use today? Do any of these aspects have value to the modern reader? Could they?

Or is the exercise of writing a "review" lost? Outside of a remake or re-release, are these kinds of retrospectives are better suited to being performed as anthropology rather than review? Is there an interest in giving newer audiences on-ramps to gaming history through a familiar format, or is the format explicitly and exclusively the work of consumer reports?

A barren office space with various employees hovering and hanging impossibly below the fluorescent lights.

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How much can you pull at the threads until something unravels? No matter what thread in the tapestry of the art form and format, you're still going to collide into some other angle of attack, some other piece of consideration, some other piece of the puzzle that doesn't fit cleanly enough to include frictionlessly.

Reviews could contain all kinds of information that most games people don't care about. But if there was the opportunity to grab that thread and pull, it would reach all the way to the core. You'd pull the mast off of the ship in the bottle, spill the vials of feelings, shatter the glass dividers between casual and enthusiast games, and still be no closer to finding the foundation of veracity or trust.

But what if we yanked anyway?

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There's no artistic reason most game reviews are about the games they're about. New, major releases are pretty much the only games getting game reviews because they're the only games people are paid to write about.

Most publications can't stretch their limited budget to cover anything other that the sorts of things that will drive traffic. Because it really is a business thing more than any other consideration. It's why there's a frenzy of publications writing about the same game at the same time, trying to reach the widest audience to sell the largest reader numbers to the largest advertisers. Game criticism is a business, one that's increasingly being swallowed whole by venture capital.

So who is a review really for? Not the audience, they're the product. Except to the writer, because then the writing itself is the product. Because they're selling their words to the outlet. Who is selling the audience to advertisers.

In this entire chain of deep pockets, the poorest people are the ones who care most about the medium. Any writer in games is skilled enough to get a job in literally any other field, making so much more money for so much less work. Most don't because they care about what games could be, why else would they do this? Why would anyone do this?

But sure, assign them a trustworthy score. Whatever.

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No game review really exists in its vacuum.

Any given review captures a moment in the reviewer's life that is tangled up in all the other parts of their life at the time. Stresses of making deadline, assessing embargo requirements, fitting the publication's style guidelines, and done in tandem with whatever other work the writer had on their plate at the same time.

Even outside of professional considerations, the reviewer also had a social and personal life. Perhaps written in the midst of a new relationship, or maybe concurrent with the loss of a distant relative, or at a time where the writer was flush with time, able to commit far more attention and resources to a single game and review than almost any other period in their professional career. Most writers are able to adjust for these factors, but not so much that they're fully invisible. The hands of circumstance reach from too many places to be simple to identify, so any given game experience will always, always be under the influence of a world that turns while words are being worked.

There's as much information to be drawn from what parts of a game review are embargoed, or under what conditions a review is allowed to be done, than there is in whatever is in the game. It's only been in the past 10 or so years that influencers who don't work for any publication are legally required to disclose that they've been sponsored when they play or talk about a game. And that only came about after a journalist dug up the extremely lopsided terms of the sponsorship.

But these are the conditions of business, not review. They are, however, embedded deeply in the guts of the thing. Press that doesn't play ball can find itself blacklisted by publishers, and lose any traffic they might get from being timely. Which loses them any income they might have earned from it. If it happens often enough, they close. Business are the ones with their grip around the strings.

But sure, assign the press a trustworthy score. Whatever.

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There is barely any room for art in any of this.

As venture capital squeezes the games press to be smaller and smaller, working on tighter and tighter budgets, there stops being room for anything other than the most middle-of-the-road, largest common denominator writing. There's just not enough pay to do anything larger, deeper, or more ambitious.

Anyone whose paid any attention to the industry of games in the past few years has seen that the wells are drying up everywhere, all at once. Fortnite, one of the most profitable games year over year, downsized in this past year. Can you imagine having a money printer like Fortnite and deciding that it doesn't make enough money?

So, where does the art come in? When is it important to care about the aspects of culture and criticism beyond looking for the most profit or the person-slash-publication whose opinion can be the best focus-tested? Do you really want every game review to be the most Vanta Beige it can?

Slap a coat of landlord white over your trustworthy score. Whatever.

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I don't really understand this foundation of trust, either. What is the ideal endpoint of getting a good grade at game review consensus anyway? Trying to build a rubric around why any given opinion about a game is "good" or "bad" seems like it's absolutely missing the point. People play games to have fun, not to have the right opinion about them. If a review scores a game you enjoy low, that's not some moral failure on either the part of you or the reviewer. It's just an opinion.

I don't really like Roblox, but that doesn't say anything about the people who do. I don't play whatever match-2 smart phone game has two hundred million downloads a month, but the people who do aren't somehow less meaningful to games just because they're not the people being advertised to on gaming criticism sites. There are far more women on the Earth than there are being advertised to by games. These are all demographic statistics, but game criticism is so deeply entrenched in the same advertising demographic it has been for decades. Because that's where the money is for publication. Because that's where the money is for advertisers.

More people have played Gardenscapes: New Acres than Minecraft. But the monetization model for phone games are different, so we don't write about them. You can't walk into a bookstore without seeing a dozen different physical publications about Minecraft. So what conclusion can you draw from what games get spoken about? Mostly who it makes money for.

So what is all of this site's trust supposed to be building towards? Some deeply seated and widely held truth about any given game? Your ability to compare how right your opinion is, on average, to any given slice of criticism? A way to finally assign a grade to a videogame you can mathematically prove other people should pay attention to?

I don't trust your trustworthy score. You shouldn't either.

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I want you to think about the first game you fell in love with. Think for a few minutes about what parts of it made you love it. Think about what parts of it were influenced by the place you were in your life when you first played it. Think about the place you played it. The time you played it.

Now think back to one of the hardest times of your life. Imagine finding your first game love at that point in your life. Do you think it would have hit the same way? Even stronger for the contrast? Or is it the kind of game that would have bristled that point of your life, for being too technically messy, or too challenging, or too close to a stress, trauma, or sadness?

Now think about where you are, right now when you're reading this. Think about how that game stacks up to every game you've played up to this very point. Has that game inspired any future games that you've gone on to love, too, and you can appreciate it for what it was foundational in influencing?

I think if you plucked me from different periods of my life, and put me in front of my favorite games, I would almost certainly have different favorites. The way that I write, the things I'm interested in writing about, the things that resonate the most with me would all be different. The reviews I would theoretically write would be different.

But they're no less true for being fixed moments in time, in my life, in my love of videogames. I can't be a different person, but pluck a random part of the multiverse and I might be. You might be. All of us, and all parts of us, different and similar and the same and completely opposite. But it doesn't mean the things we care about, or the way we care about them, is fake for the difference.

But there isn't a way to write, read, or care about reviews that is inherently trustworthy. No rubric or framework or algorithm can.

And I don't trust anything that tries to convince anyone otherwise.