I’m a very particular young lady with very particular tastes- and I like to try to stay positive in my reviews. They’re more of a highlights reel of what I enjoyed, versus attempting to take a stab at play-pretend being Mathbrush or Russo in breadth.
Personally, I adhere to the ‘if I don’t have anything nice to say, best to keep mum and move on’ train of thought: so my reviews will skew broadly positive and my rankings do so accordingly as well: very rarely will I hand out less than 5 stars, though I don’t hand out many ratings or reviews in the grand scheme of things.
But if I had to try to assign a general sense to stars, if say, I had to rate every single game something in a hypothetical comp:
5 stars
I love this. I want to yell about how much I love it from the nearest suitable surface to shimmy up like one of those unhinged philosophers in Fallen London. I’m going to tell all of my friends about it, for sure, and I’ll write a review up as well.
4 stars
This is objectively, a great game! Some parts of it might not have worked for me- (this is usually a genre thing, I am quite the fussy little reader, though it can also just be a format thing, I’m not very fond of parsers or puzzle-y games) but it definitely would resonate with others, who I might pass this along to.
3 stars
It’s a game that I see some shiny potential in, but is not one that I enjoy- maybe it’s hampered by excessively purple prose (I know, I know, guilty as charged!), or it’s difficult to make sense of due to a lack of thorough proofreading, or it might simply just not have worked for me and I don’t think it would for someone else who was in the target audience either (a poorly executed genre work sold on its faithfulness to the genre?). Overall, it could be good, great, even- but needs some serious work, to the extent it hampers my enjoyment and I believe it would for others, as well.
2 stars
It’s just not a game I would recommend or particularly enjoy, but it is a game.
1 star
This is either so buggy and broken I can’t play it at all in a meaningful fashion, or it’s disgustingly immoral or straight up illegal content.