The magic kind of middling: All my love to 6/10 games

What’s the best score a game can get? The enthusiastic critical acclaim of a 9/10? The once-a-generation perfection of a 10/10? No. The best score a game can ever get is a 6/10. I’ll freely admit that number—with or without the hundreds (if not a thousand or more) words surrounding it that provide precious context and reasoning—doesn’t usually indicate a ringing endorsement. Normally, receiving a 6/10 means a game is either just above completely average or, for certain corners of the internet that insist anything less than a solid 8 should be utterly ignored, pure trash. And for many 6/10 games that’s a reasonable enough assessment. They’re OK. Fine. Passable. But there’s another, special, kind of 6/10 game. The magical sort that are anything from a bit rough around the edges to outright broken, a perfectly good idea that tripped over its own shoelaces somewhere along the way. This kind of 6/10 is probably ten years too early or too late to a popular trend, or shows so much promise it…