How We Actually Decide a Rating

People ask what our ratings mean, so here's the honest version. A number is just shorthand for a conversation we had.

We weigh how a game feels on a normal phone, whether it respects your time, and whether it does its own thing well rather than copying the chart-toppers.

A 4.1 and a 4.6 can both be games we recommend — one just has more rough edges. We'd rather be clear about trade-offs than pretend everything is perfect or awful.

And yes, we argue. Markus and I disagreed about Neon Circuit Dash for an hour. That tension is kind of the point.