288 games reviewed since January: we are handing you the keys to the ranking

Two hundred and eighty-eight. That is how many games we have reviewed and scored since January, controller in hand, from the seventy-euro heavyweight to the two-coffee simulator that shipped on a Tuesday morning without anyone noticing.

Watching that number appear, two thoughts arrived. The first was that we should probably sleep more. The second was that at this point it is no longer a pile of articles, it is a year that says something. So we opened it, we counted, and we are handing you the keys: voting is open.

What 288 scores say about us

First, a statistical confession: our average is 7.03, with the median at exactly 7. In other words we hand out neither tens nor twos. Only seven games earned a 9, and five fell below 5. The rest live in that middle ground where real criticism happens, the land of "it is good but" and "it is a failure except".

The pace, meanwhile, went wild. Thirty reviews in April, sixty-one in June, one hundred and twenty-three in July. We did not speed up, the indie release calendar simply stopped having seasons. There are Tuesdays when fourteen games launch the same morning.

The statistic we did not see coming

Here is the one that stopped us. Our five lowest scores of the year: Sword & Shield Simulator, Cleaning Up!, Supermarket Chaos, The Ranchers, Wild West Miner Simulator.

Look closely. With one exception, these are all games that give you a job. Forging, cleaning, running a till, digging. The bottom of our ranking is not populated by technical failures, it is populated by games that confuse the task with the pleasure, and that ask the player to perform a chore in exchange for a progress bar.

This is not a condemnation of the genre. Some trade simulators are excellent, precisely because they offer the moment of reversal where machines take over and you go from labourer to engineer. These never offer it. You dig so you can dig faster, until the end.

The exception on that list is The Ranchers, and its case is worth recalling because it concerns us. We gave it a 7 at launch. Then we checked what had actually been delivered against its crowdfunding promises, and rewrote the article from top to bottom to bring it down to 4.5. It is the only score we have corrected that far, and it taught us a lesson: a press kit is not a game.

Four categories, and you decide

We could have given you our top and closed the subject. It is more interesting to let you contradict us.

Game of the half-year gathers our eight highest scores, from Fields of Mistria to Sovereign Tower by way of DOOM The Dark Ages. Seven of them share the same 9, so our own ranking settles nothing at all. Yours will.

Best surprise collects the very good ones that are not at the summit, the games nobody saw coming that caught us off guard, from Sudden Strike 5 to Sandustry.

Biggest disappointment is the subtlest category, and we insisted on separating it from the next one. Disappointing is not the same as being bad. It is promising and not delivering, ending up lukewarm when you hoped for more. So these are the games between 5 and 6.5, the ones you remember with a shrug.

And then there is the hall of shame, below average, the only ranking nobody wants a podium place in.

How it works

One vote per category, on the Awards page. No account to create, no email to hand over, nothing to install. You click, results appear immediately, and you see live whether the other readers agree with you.

Nominees are pulled automatically from our own scores, which has one advantage and one flaw. The advantage is that we cannot quietly slip our favourite into the list. The flaw is that a game we underscored by mistake has no chance of appearing. If you spot an outrageous omission, say so: this mid-year edition also exists to test the machinery before December's, which will cover the whole year.

So we will ask you the question that actually interests us: which game this year do you think we got completely wrong?

Vote in the InsertCoins Awards