One number per game, out of ten, to one decimal place, written only after the completion screen. Because it describes a whole game rather than an opening, it usually sits below the launch consensus, and that gap is the entire reason this desk exists.
Roughly a third of a rating reflects the second half of the game. That is unusual and deliberate. A game which is superb for twenty hours and hollow for eighty is, in our accounting, a different proposition from one which is superb for twenty hours and ends at hour twenty-two, and the second deserves the higher number.
The corollary is that length is never itself a virtue here. Paper Alibi is thirty-one hours long and rated higher than everything else on the index, because nothing in it is filler. Hollow Crown is seven times longer and rated lower. We would rather state that weighting openly than let readers infer it from a pattern.
The tables in each report inform the rating but do not determine it arithmetically. A ratio of 341 objectives to 19 task types is a strong signal of padding, but the quality of those nineteen still matters enormously, and a game with fewer types executed brilliantly can rate above one with more executed adequately.
What the counts do is make the argument checkable. A reader who thinks we were harsh on Lantern Acre can look at the delivery table, decide that repetitive logistics are restful rather than tedious, and reach a different conclusion from the same figures. That is a productive disagreement, which is more than can be said for arguing about the word "repetitive".
The most-used part of this site. For every game where completion is not worthwhile, we publish the hour at which a reader should deliberately stop, chosen to land on a real resolution rather than merely at the point of decline. Stopping on purpose at a good moment produces a better experience than drifting away at a bad one.
| Game | Total hours | Stop at | What you would miss |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hollow Crown | 214 | Hour 90 | One ending, 60% of objectives, no new mechanics |
| Lantern Acre | 118 | Hour 60 | An 11-minute closing festival, 300 deliveries |
| Star Ladder Isle | 52 | 90 stars | 250 collectibles in already-solved levels |
| Paper Alibi | 31 | Do not stop | The best case in the game is the last one |
| Vault Of Nine | 74 | Do not stop | Eleven hours of entirely new material |
| Ledger Of Nations | 96 | Any time | Nothing; the design has no end state |
A rating changes only when a counting error was large enough to alter the conclusion, or when a substantial patch changed the requirement we measured. Taste never revises a rating, and neither does the passage of time. Both revisions to date are listed here with the original figure intact.
| Game | Original | Revised | Reason |
|---|---|---|---|
| Star Ladder Isle | 7.4 | 6.9 | Recount found 38 collectibles misclassified as distinct |
| Vault Of Nine | 8.4 | 8.8 | Patch removed a grind gate before the optional dungeon |
These numbers may not appear in advertising, on storefront pages or in any promotional material. A rating from this desk is inseparable from the hour count and the task table that produced it, and quoting the figure alone converts a specific finding into a meaningless endorsement.
Readers occasionally ask whether we are simply miserable. The honest answer is that completion is a hostile way to meet a game, and that most long games are not designed to survive it. A launch review describing hours one to fifteen and a completion report describing hours one to two hundred are answering different questions, and both answers are true.
