Unscored is an attempt by a research student who has plenty of better things to do with his time an enthusiast who has closely followed developments in the video games industry to take a radically different approach to reviewing video games. While games media is no longer in its infancy, game reviews occupy a very specific niche – they are often seen as a guide for consumers looking to make purchasing decisions, around the time of its release.
As a consequence, the plot of a game is regarded with utmost sanctity, and spoilers are avoided by any reviewer of video games worth their salt. When reviewing story-rich video games such as JRPGs, reviewers are thus presented with the challenge of expressing their opinions while carefully treading around key plot points.
While Aerith’s death in Final Fantasy VII is about as much of a well kept secret in games media as the identity of Darth Vader is in movies, not everyone was thrilled to learn the identity of the seventh party member in the recently launched Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition (a remake of a 10 year old game at this point) from IGN’s video review – and perhaps justifiably so. The payoff to be had from going into a game blind cannot be understated.
What’s worse, spoilers need not even be necessarily tied to a game’s narrative. For instance, knowing that it’s a terrible idea to attack your enemies in Undertale, or that Doki Doki Literature Club is actually a horror game in disguise before your first experience with either would substantially ruin your experience – both being games that do their best to play with an average player’s expectation of their respective genres. While it is possible to avoid explicitly stating what makes these games tick, it deprives them of the critical appreciation that they truly deserve.
Yet another issue with the modern video game review is that of the score at the end. As absurd as it may be to distill a reviewer’s complex opinion of a game and its myriad systems down into a single figure lying squarely in the narrow range between 7.5 and 10, it remains the norm. While there exist systems such as the “Liked”, “Liked it a lot” and “Loved” of GameXplain, the vast majority of games media still sticks to delivering an all-too-convenient tl;dr for each game that they review on the 10-point scale.
On this website, I’m looking forward to reviewing games that aren’t necessarily a part of the contemporary discourse in games media at large. The games I could be reviewing may be a month old, a year old, or even a decade old. Each review is going to be a deep dive into both a game’s plot and its systems – without necessarily skirting around spoilers. Worry not, for spoilers will still be adequately marked – but expect them to tie more heavily into the larger discussion. As such, my reviews probably aren’t going to help you decide if you should buy a game, but rather, are a recollection of what makes them special, unique or memorable (be it for reasons right or wrong) to me in particular.
Given my laziness, here’s hoping this is just the beginning and not the end for Unscored!