I have this thesis that while a 10/10 game may leave you breathless, and a 9/10 game will stick with you for a long time, 6/10 and 7/10 games are where the REAL sickos_yes.jpg moments come in more often than not, and the world needs more heartfelt games in that bracket.
OK, so frequently a 6/10 game will leave you all "nyeehhh I dunno" and a 7/10 game will leave you going "ok but the character portraits are wonky and the movement is kinda floaty and" forget it. If a game misses a game misses. Don't worry about it. If your money is tight enough that "it might miss" is a dealbreaker (and that's valid I've been there I have been SO badly off) well, we live in a world of unparalleled information access, check out reviews, check out play footage, give it a lil while and be patient, and if you're so concerned with spoilers that this is something you just can't do... well, personally I urge you to re-evaluate your relationship with the subject if you are both hyper-attentive to spoilers/find the fresh, no-info playthrough so important that you can't look up anything about the game AND you're so concerned that it "might" miss that you're unwilling to take risks, but ultimately that's a you thing, right? In matters of taste the customer is always right, and all that
But "oof it didn't quite..." is something that the mythical 10/10 and 9/10 games hit too, you know? Like for me, it's vanishingly rare that you get a firing-on-all-cylinders Disco Elysium "10/10 game where even the friction points only draw me further back into the game and I not only don't worry about that, but the parts which should irritate me only encourage me to play it more and from different angles", or a 9/10 XCOM 2 where the flaws are charming (except for the instances where they're infuriating, but quickly fade back to charming and "Well, that's XCOM baby!" after the moment has passed enough to cool down). Normally, I'm playing through a 10/10, or one that's a perfect 10 for me and I'm sitting here like well, ok, this game is That Good, but is everyone going to think it's That Good, am I going to be able to go thoroughly sicko-mode about what resonates with me or are friends going to go "eh... nah that wasn't there, I didn't like it", is everyone having a comparable experience to me, and that sort of thing sometimes pulls me out even! Like even the aforementioned Disco Elysium, I'll be completely taken out by some ridiculously raw dialog which resonates with my fucking soul and then thinking about it, wonder "ok but that's just a me thing, right? I'm gonna have to explain why it was so meaningful, aren't I" and that can in fact ruin the moment. Or sometimes you get those moments and the opposite hits you, you realize that this moment is precision engineered by the Best Minds That The Company Could Hire in order to make sure that yeah, EVERYONE who's interested in this game will get the same WOAH moment at the same place for this... guided tour of artistic meaning moment, this manufactured emotion? Or you'll get your Hades 9/10 games and that one weapon you don't click with at all, which keeps being picked for the bonus roulette, the flaw in your relationship with the game stops being charming and starts being GLARING. Game is still a 9/10, but the issues you have with it stand out more and more over time.
And this isn't actually "bad"! I'm not saying "oh haha I am an enlightened critic you should be needling at perfect games, come on, tear them down" far from it, god, fuck that. This is me saying "don't overly fret the fact that 7/10 games might not land, might not be perfect, BECAUSE there's arguably no such thing as a game that IS perfect, every game will have those moments, that's just part of art and being human".
And for the good 7/10 games, well, yeah! They often hit that button by caring overly much about Their Thing and letting other things fall by the wayside, or by being a labor of desperate love by people who don't have the chops to pull off their vision but tried anyway, and that's beautiful to me.
And the friction often leads me to be way more invested and enthralled than a seamless, frictionless, homogenous experience.
This incoherent late-night ramble brought to you by picking up Capes (a new superpowered-vigilante, turn-based character-tactics game with a mix of tactical puzzle and story based missions) while I was waiting for a painkiller window, and getting slapped with absolutely cheesetastic dialog delivered with FERVOR. Like in one fairly early cutscene, the grizzled, defeated mentor figure is meeting with his shiny superman friend and we get the line
"You've got nuclear muscles, and you're asking me what I think you can do to help? So they've got powerful friends! You're MY powerful friend. USE that for something for once." And this is "bad" dialog, or so a lot of my film-enjoying friends would tell me, so a lot of my fiction-reading friends would tell me, it's so on the nose, it's delivered really early, it doesn't have a lot of build up... but it's delivered with genuine oomph and that takes "cheesy, bad" dialog and turns it into "BEST" dialog, you know?
It's the Blade 3 moment, one of the shining moments from the often-lackluster episode of the trilogy, where our heroes are trying to break into an evil vampire blood bank facility and the guard is shaking in his boots and stammering "I, I can't let you in, they'll kill me..." and Blade drops his sword arm down to his side and just stares incredulously and goes "th- KILL you? Motherfucker I'LL kill you!" and I'm just grinning because THIS IS SUCH GOOD CHEESE, MELT IT AND GIVE ME MORE, THANKS
