Here's How to Find Good Games in the Age of Game Score "Gradeflation"
Video game review scores are meant to give you a good way to quickly judge if a game is worth looking into further, but thanks to grade inflation or "gradeflation" video game scores don't really help that much anymore.
This is the same sort of thing that's happened with ratings of all kinds. If you've ever used a service like Uber, you know that giving a driver five out of five stars is the right score for a perfectly average job. Logically, you'd think three stars would be the average, but the driver needs to literally set ou on fire to deserve a score that "low." This skewing of scores seems to have kicked in with games as well. In the 90s, a video game magazine would give a score of 50% to a game that was basically OK, but nothing special. Now that's a 70. Getting an 80% score in the old days meant it was a genre-leading game. Now an 80 just means "good". Effectively, the real scale only runs from 70 to 100.
So, if a video game score doesn't help you figure out where to spend your money, is there another way?
Find a Reviewer Who Likes Games You Already Like
Reviews are subjective, and attaching a score to them without a clear and consistent rubric might not be that smart to begin with. There are plenty of incredibly high-scoring games that I think are boring (Breath of the Wild) or barely games (Red Dead Redemption 2), which would make me an iconoclast in some cases. However, tehre are reviewers who have similar tastes to mine, so instead of worrying about an average score on Metacritic or what mainstream reviewers think of a game, try to find a reviewer who has given good scores to games you already love. Then look for games they've reviewed well to get an idea of what you should play next.
Read the Reviews, Not the Scores
A review score can give you an at-a-glance idea of how good the reviewer thinks a game is overall, but there's really not a lot of information there. They might have disliked a game for reasons that mean nothing to you. They might
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