How we score games at JoltBox

People ask us what a rating actually means, so here's the honest answer. A score is one editor's summary after finishing the game, sanity-checked by whoever else played it. It's subjective, and we're fine saying so.

We weigh how a game feels to control, how it respects your time, whether it delivers on what it promises, and whether we actually wanted to keep playing. A technically flawless game that bored us gets marked down.

We never score below what a game deserves to make a point, and we never nudge a score up because a developer was nice to us. Nobody pays for coverage here, full stop.

If you disagree with a number, that's genuinely fine. Read the words, they matter more than the digit. The rating is just a quick handle for something that's really a paragraph.