How We Review Our Own Games (Cons and All)
Somewhere on the internet there is a review of a game the reviewer never opened. You can usually tell. It lists the store description back to you in slightly different words, gives everything an eight, and reaches a "verdict" that could describe a hundred other games. We've read a thousand of those. We refuse to write one, even about our own games.
That last part is the unusual bit. We're a small studio, and every game on this site is one we built. Most studios treat their own store page as a billboard. We do the opposite. On each game's page we publish a real verdict: a score, the pros, and the cons we'd still like to fix. Here are the rules we hold ourselves to, in the open, so you know exactly what a rating from us is worth.
Rule one: we don't rate what we haven't played to death
This is the foundation. We don't score a game off the design doc or a first playtest. We rate it after we've lived with it: dozens of sessions, on a phone and a laptop, long after the novelty wore off. A game can be charming for ten minutes and hollow by hour two, and you only feel that if you're still there at hour two. Building the thing doesn't exempt us; if anything it makes us more suspicious of our own first impressions.
Rule two: a number out of five, and we mean it
Every verdict carries a rating out of five. Not a vague "recommended" badge; a number we're willing to defend. We keep the scale honest by refusing to bunch everything at the top. If all our games scored a four, the score would stop meaning anything, so we treat three as a genuinely fine game worth your time, and five as rare and earned. The words underneath always explain how we got there. If the rating and the writeup ever disagree, trust the writeup. That's where the actual thinking lives.
Rule three: real pros and real cons, every time
This is the one we care about most. Every verdict lists honest pros and real cons, including on the games we're proudest of. Not token cons. Actual weaknesses a real person will bump into: a difficulty curve that spikes, a mechanic that takes too long to click, a loop that gets repetitive on a long session.
A review with no downsides isn't trustworthy. It's a sales pitch, and everyone can feel the difference, doubly so when it's the studio's own game. When we tell you one of ours gets grindy after twenty minutes, that's not false modesty. It's us respecting that it's your afternoon on the line, not ours. And there's a selfish reason it works: the moment you see us name a genuine flaw in our own game and still stand behind it, our praise starts to mean something. A studio that loves everything it ships loves nothing.
Rule four: every verdict names a "best for"
No game is for everyone, and pretending otherwise helps no one. So each verdict ends by naming who the game is actually for. "Best for: a five-minute palate cleanser between meetings." "Best for: players who want a real reflex wall to bang their head against." This one line does more work than the score — it's the difference between shouting that a game is great into a crowd and quietly telling you whether it's great for you. When the "best for" clearly isn't you, that's a verdict doing its job: it just saved you the click.
Rule five: the same standard for every game, favourite or not
It would be easy to write a scorching, detailed critique of the game we like least and a soft, gushing paragraph for the one we're proudest of. We don't. Every game gets the same template, the same honesty, and the same willingness to name what we'd change. The game we personally love most on this site still has cons listed under it, in our own words.
That consistency is the point. It's the boring, unglamorous version of honesty, written down so we can't quietly drift away from it when a game is fun to hype.
Why any of this earns your trust
When we hand one of our games a high score and say it's the best thing we've built, you'll know we've also, somewhere on this very site, told you where another of ours falls short. The critical verdicts are what make the glowing ones worth reading. That's the trade we're making with you, and we intend to keep our end of it.
If you want to see the standard in practice, start with our Complete CellSnake Guide. It's our own game, and we still don't pretend it's flawless.
Frequently asked questions
You made these games, so how is your review not just marketing?+
Because we list the cons. Anyone can write a glowing blurb for their own game. Almost no studio will tell you, on its own site, where its game gets repetitive or who it's wrong for. The honest downside is what makes the praise worth anything.
Do you really give your own games less than five stars?+
Yes. If everything scored a five, the number would mean nothing. We treat three as a genuinely good game worth your time and reserve five for the ones that truly earn it. And we stay honest when one of ours lands lower than we'd like.
Where do these verdicts appear?+
On each game's page, under the game itself: a rating out of five, what works, what we'd still improve, and a 'best for' line. This article is the methodology behind those verdicts.
