We took a single question — is this item better than the one I am carrying? — and counted the button presses required to answer it in fifty-two games. The median was four. The worst was eleven, in a game whose entire loop is picking things up.
Each review records HUD legibility at two resolutions, the action cost of the three most common tasks, whether the game hides numbers its own systems depend on, and the depth of its options.
Two actions to place a marker, one to read elevation, and a legend that explains itself without a wiki. It is also the only map in fifty-two games that shows you what you have not yet seen rather than what you have.
Six menu layers and a memory test. The entire game is deciding what to carry, and it will not put two things side by side. We timed the workaround at forty-one seconds per decision, repeated several hundred times.
We measured slot counts, sort options and action cost across nineteen games. The grid persists not because it is good but because it is cheap to build, and the two games that abandoned it were both better for it.
A strategy game that exposes its own arithmetic: supply, morale and terrain modifiers all visible on one screen without a hover, a tooltip or a second click. The interface is dense and it is never dishonest.
Every recipe returns you to the top of the list, which is fine for the first hour and a genuine cost across thirty. The underlying survival design is strong enough to survive it, which is the only reason this scores where it does.
A short account of the deepest options menu we have recorded, and of why menu depth is the single most reliable predictor of whether a game's settings were tested by anybody outside the team that built them.
Notes and teardowns that examine one screen, one convention or one measurement rather than a whole game.
Four investigation games measured for how much of their case file is legible at a glance. Three require zooming to read a card that the game expects you to cross-reference from memory.
We record full rebinding support separately from every other option because a game that cannot be remapped cannot be operated by a large number of people who bought it.
