Adventure Gamers - Forums

I know the topic has gone a little off-topic, but I wanted to comment on the recent high scoring games, because I think DCast made a good point.

Of the ones mentioned I’ve played Norco, Perfect Tides, Crowns and Pawns and the demo for Dexter Stardust.

The Norco rating I actually agree with it and it has received a lot of positive praise even in the mainstream press. The Guardian’s The best games of 2022 so far.

My personal rating for Perfect Tides and Crowns and Pawns is a half star less. I think they are both good games, but even with my lower scores I thought I was being generous since I’m biased towards the nostalgia these games are appealing to (in different ways).

However, the main one I wanted to comment about is Dexter Stardust. Maybe the game gets better, but after playing the demo / prologue it felt like a completely generic, “run of the mill” game as DCast said. This is a game that I would be shocked to see on any other site’s “Best Games of 2022”. Actually, I’m willing to bet that it doesn’t even win an Aggie next year. Imagine that Return of Monkey Island gets a 4.5/5. In that case do you really think the site is going to pick this game over ROMI for best traditional adventure or best comedic game?

Maybe I’m being harsh, but I don’t see this game appealing to many people outside of adventure game fans and when they go to a game’s steam page and the developer has posted “4.5/5 stars on Adventure Gamers” in their marketing they should expect that they are in for something special when playing it. 

The reason I still donate to the Patreon every month is for the review section, even if I don’t post that often in the forums since I think I like to read reviews of adventure games from people familiar with the genre. I used to trust that a 4.5 or 5 from Adventure Gamers meant that the game is a must-play, but unfortunately that’s no longer the case.

I’ve seen this too.

The five episodes in Dexter Stardust vary a lot. The game is split into uneven chunks. At the beginning and at the end the story is in the focus whilst in the middle (I guess it was episode 3) it gets puzzle heavy.

The most valuable thing about a review is, that there is a review at all, which gives a game visibility, so, that some people have a chance to hear about a game. A database entry, in which readers can vote for games, can be a nice source already.

Vegetable Party - 10 June 2022 05:10 AM

That’s unfortunate. I have a couple of questions, if that’s alright.

Is it just the scores? Do the reviews still provide useful information, or interesting views? And are the scores justified by the reviews themselves - do they explain what merits the rating?

Would you prefer reviewers to distance themselves as much as possible from personal preferences and specific pet peeves, or do you like observations when they’re based on familiarity and personal experience with the genre?

Is there too much focus on one aspect (narrative, for example) over others (puzzles, graphics, music/sound design, etc)? Would you prefer specific ratings for each aspect and a score based on some kind of metric, or should it be more of an art than a science?

I think the quality and perspective of the reviews is still incredibly useful. For example, in the Outer Wilds review the reviewer specifically called out that if you have a problem with dying and replaying like in the old adventures then you might not enjoy this game. I didn’t listen and picked up the game because the praise for the game was near unanimous elsewhere and none of the discussion elsewhere called that out as a big problem. However, I had to stop playing the game due to frustration and I was glad that the review on this site exists to give a different perspective.

But like Baron_Blubba said, our time is limited and we can’t play everything so reviews are a good way to see if a game will be worth the time investment. Money is also limited but less of an issue since games go into bundles and are given away for free so much the price is less important if you are patient enough.

My main issue with the scores is that different authors have different scales, as in some use the more metacritic 3 to 5 star scale where an average game is like a 3.5 versus actually using the full star scale where the average should be a 2.5 so consistency would be nice. I do like that you can see an author’s review history which helps with showing the skew. A way to address this that might not be too difficult is to also show the author’s average rating by the score so one can have a sense of how they rate games more generally.

And I don’t mean to pick on the Dexter Stardust reviewer too much since I think they write very good reviews but looking at their most recent 25 reviews I calculate an average of 3.62. So going forward I know to think of a game they rate 3.5 or 4 as average, 4.5 as good and 5 as great, rather than 4=great, 4.5=GOTY contender and 5=All-time favorite which is the rating scale I use.

Absolutely agree with TheLongestJourney on the consistency of the scoring. Which scale is it? What is “average” for the AG reviewers? We’ve been getting high marks left and right, so am I to understand that we’ve been flooded with, like Doom said, a flurry of masterpieces?

Because I’ve played either a full game or an prologue/demo for almost all of them (besides Perfect Tides), and only NORCO made an impression on me as the game that I personally didn’t really enjoy, but I can 100% see other people liking it. I’ve got 0 qualms with NORCO getting its high marks. The rest of Dexters, Half-past Fates and Crowalts? Middle-of-the-road, forget-right-after-you-played-it, generic adventures. They aren’t bad, mind you. They are just average. So there isn’t much value in 4 and 4.5 stars anymore because they are generously given to games with “GOOD” attributes like - “unobtrusive background music” or “not too much backtracking”.

Add to the points of BB and TheLongestJourneys here - money and time invested does matter. And I hope that it’s clear that the only reason we even have discussion right now is because people here trust in this site. We care, we read reviews, we talk, we ask questions - all of this is a good sign of people that are actually involved.

I think it would be excellent to bring back comments section of the reviews, of which fiksdal reminded. It would, indeed, at least attempt to balance some scores that enough people here see as undeserved.

EDIT: Just read Doom’s last comment after I posted mine and wanted to add that I ABSOLUTELY miss that more critical approach to adventures AG seemed to have in the past. That only means one thing - they were holding the games to the highest possible standard. Which is what it should be when it comes to something we’re passionate about. And it does build trust.

Vegetable Party - 10 June 2022 06:25 PM

Question about the comment option: I don’t remember it being used a lot and with current ways of leaving your own rating, would it have a function beyond commenting on the review itself?

That’s pretty much what you’re saying here, Vegetable.. I’ve re-added the comment section for quite a long time (like a year ago) to see it result in about two comments during a few months. After a while, I gave up and removed it again as it was just not getting any traction, honestly.

Since then, I’ve tried to find ways to get the perspective of others with community reviews/ratings, but even there, there’s often hardly any beyond a star rating…  If you go to any game page, you’ll see we give pretty much as prominent coverage of how the community rates it versus how Adventure Gamers rate it.

I’m still very open to ideas and suggestions on how to provide this visibility more, as I genuinely like the idea and feel it complements well; the thing is mainly that I’ve often heard folks want something, me spending time to add it, and then there’s hardly any usage.