My Quest to Rate Every Game I’ve Ever Played

The Philosophy

Most review scores collapse everything into a single number and call it a day. That works fine for a quick purchasing decision, but it hides the story. A 9.0 could be a flawless action game with a terrible story, or a deeply emotional narrative experience with clunky controls. Those are not the same game and they shouldn't share a number without explanation.

This framework rates games across nine dimensions, each weighted to reflect how much it typically determines whether a game is genuinely great — not just impressive. The composite score is a weighted average of whichever dimensions were relevant and scored for that game.

The Nine Dimensions

Why Does BotW Score Below Cyberpunk?

This is exactly the kind of question this system is built to answer transparently. Breath of the Wild is a masterpiece of exploration and gameplay feel — but it scores modestly in Story and Challenge (the combat rarely demands much from you), and Nostalgia scores lower because it was encountered later in life. Cyberpunk 2077, post-patches, is an extraordinary Story + Depth experience with a killer soundtrack and one of the most visually realized worlds in gaming.

The composite score isn't a judgment of which game is "objectively better." It's a weighted statement of what a game excels at across the dimensions that matter most to a fully-formed gaming experience. BotW wins on gameplay feel. Cyberpunk wins on narrative depth and presentation. Both are excellent. The number tells you how they're excellent, not just whether they are.

Why Gameplay Gets the Most Weight

At 18%, Gameplay is the single largest dimension — larger than Story, larger than Presentation, larger than anything else. The reasoning is simple: a game with a great story and terrible gameplay is a bad game. The medium is interactive. The moment-to-moment feel of controlling a character, the responsiveness of inputs, the tactile satisfaction of a well-tuned system — that's the thing that makes games different from films and books. Everything else is context. Gameplay is the foundation.

Rating Old Games vs. New Games

Visual presentation is always rated relative to its era. An Atari 2600 game from 1980 isn't expected to look like a PlayStation title. What's evaluated is whether the game was visually impressive, coherent, and well-designed for its time. Gameplay, however, is more absolute — a game with bad controls was a game with bad controls even in 1985.

Impact is naturally skewed toward older games: if something defined a genre decades before most people had access to it, that influence is recognized here even if the game itself feels primitive now. Conversely, a technically brilliant modern game that treads completely familiar ground will score lower on Impact because the medium has moved past it.

What a 10 Means (and Why So Few Games Have One)

A 10 in any dimension means there is no meaningful room for improvement in that category. A 10 in Gameplay means the controls are essentially perfect for what the game is trying to do. A 10 in Music means the soundtrack is so iconic and well-executed that it defined the experience. These are rare. Most games, even great ones, hover between 7 and 9 in their best dimensions.

A composite score above 9.0 means a game scores extremely high across most weighted dimensions simultaneously — not just one or two. That's exceptionally hard to achieve. A 7.5 composite is a genuinely good game. A 6.0 is decent but flawed. Below 5.0 means the game failed on its own terms.

Recent Changes to This Methodology

• May 2025 — Score history tracking added: composite changes are auto-logged with timestamps and version notes. Rankings now show all games with lazy-load rather than a top-10 cap.
• Apr 2025 — Epic tier decoupled from game-count requirement — score alone (≥7.25) now qualifies.
• Mar 2025 — Tier system introduced: Legendary/Epic/Rare/Uncommon/Common/Junk thresholds by score.
• Feb 2025 — Creator rankings added: Bayesian weighted average (C=2 prior) to handle creators with few games.
• Jan 2025 — Initial nine-dimension framework launched with weighted composite scoring.