9.2
Spire Of Glass
The fastest retry loop we have ever timed, at four tenths of a second from death to the next attempt. 1,340 logged attempts and not one of them involved waiting for anything.
9.2/10 1,340 attempts 0.4s retry 6 assists
All reviews
Six games, 4,912 counted attempts
A review appears here only once the game has been finished on its default difficulty with every attempt logged. Games abandoned before completion are filed as notes instead.
9.2
8.9
Crowned Ash
287 attempts on a single boss and a full account of every one. The fight never introduces information it has not already shown you, which is the clearest definition of fair difficulty we have.
8.9/10 287 on one wall 6.1s retry 4 assists
7.9
Bastion Line
Genuinely difficult decisions undermined by an interface that hides four of the numbers those decisions depend on. Once we found them in a submenu the game became far better and slightly less interesting.
7.9/10 212 attempts Hidden values 2 assists
7.4
Sigil Run
A roguelike whose difficulty comes almost entirely from the first three minutes of a run. We logged 486 runs and 71 per cent of the losses were decided before the halfway point.
7.4/10 486 runs 2.2s retry 3 assists
6.1
Winterhold Run
Nothing here is hard to understand or hard to execute. It is simply slow to recover from, and a 38-second retry loop turns every mistake into a punishment rather than a lesson.
6.1/10 94 attempts 38s retry 1 assist
5.8
Lantern Watch
Guard behaviour varies enough that identical inputs sometimes produce different outcomes. We logged 41 such cases out of 163 attempts, which makes learning the rules impossible in principle.
5.8/10 163 attempts 41 inconsistencies 2 assists
Six of six reviews shown
Notes and logs filed separately