Hello World and Review criteria

Welcome everyone to my blog! I'm going to try and update this blog once a month with one or multiple game reviews. This page will be regularly updated as the Stasocritic system gets updated as well.

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Review criteria

My criteria are taken from the Farlands design den Youtube channel. The author, Stanislav Costiuc, an experienced game designer, has worked four years on a game scoring system called the Stasocritic system. I really enjoy his game reviews and he additionally shared details about Stasocritic on his Patreon page.

I asked him if I could use Stasocritic for my Review blog and he gladly gave me permission.

Cool guy.

The criteria are the following : Aesthetics, Context, Cohesion, Emotions, and Design. Each one of these criteria are weighted differently depending on their importance.

Each criteria will get a score from 1 to 10, with each grade having a particular meaning.

Aesthetics

This category is about graphics, sound, and style. Its weight is 1.

Context

Not necessarily about story, this can be about motivations for the player, environmental storytelling, the world we're in. The weight is 1.

Cohesion

This is about how aesthetics, design, and context all work together to create a coherent experience. The use of "gamey" refers to elements that are there only because this is a game, with no other particular meaning or reason. The weight is 2.

Emotions

As you can imagine, this is the most subjective category. A very unpolished game might spark very positive feelings, just like a well put together game might bore me. And at the end of the day, these feelings will shape my experience. This is why emotions have a weight of 3.

Design

As Stanislav says in his Patreon post, "Design is not about any specific design notions, but about how well a game achieves what it tries to do, and therefore all scores for design are relative to that." Since this is the category that relates to gameplay, the most important element of a game according to this system, its weight is 4.

Results

For calculating the final score, I will be taking each one of the grades, multiply them by their weight, and then add each one up. We then remove 10 from the total score to get a score of a total weight of 10.

Each result has a meaning that you can find on the image below.

I hope I'll do this system justice. If you want more details don't hesitate to check Stanislav's Patreon post.

stay froggy