One number out of ten, to one decimal place, describing shared play on one screen and nothing else. A game can be superb alone and score badly here without any contradiction, because we are answering a narrower question than a general review.
Roughly a third of the score is skill-gap tolerance, because that determines whether the game survives contact with a real household. Another third covers the practical layer: legibility, copies, saves, cameras, pausing and session length. The remaining third is the quality of the game itself as an activity for two, which is where design, humour and depth all sit.
The consequence of that weighting is worth stating clearly. A shallow game that anybody can join instantly will often score above a deeper game that requires a tutorial and punishes an inexperienced partner. That is intentional. If you want to know which is the better game, a general review will tell you; we are telling you which will work on your sofa.
Every game is checked at two and a half metres on a 55-inch display, which is a realistic living room rather than a desk. We look at order text, labels, timers, subtitles and any prompt the game expects you to read under pressure. Where an element fails, we name it in the review rather than describing the game vaguely as "hard to read".
This single check has changed our verdict on several games. Interface elements designed for a full screen frequently become unusable at half height, and it is the most common reason a technically competent cooperative game is unpleasant in practice.
Three practical facts appear in every review because they determine what you actually have to buy and what happens to your progress. We test all three rather than reading the store page, because store pages are frequently wrong about the second and almost never mention the third.
| Fact | What we check | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Copies needed | Whether two people can play from one purchase | Doubles the cost when the answer is two |
| Machines needed | Whether one machine drives both players | Most households have one |
| Save ownership | Whose profile records progress and unlocks | Player two may keep nothing |
| Camera control | Whether the view follows one player or both | Decides who is really playing |
| Pause behaviour | Whether a round can be interrupted | Living rooms have doorbells |
We log every genuine disagreement during a session and afterwards classify each as fair or unfair. A fair dispute is one where the game showed both players what happened and somebody was demonstrably wrong. An unfair dispute is one where the information needed to settle it was never on screen.
Fair disputes are a positive signal and appear in the score as such — Double Service scores highly partly because it produced fourteen of them in an evening and all fourteen were resolvable. Unfair disputes count heavily against a game, because they are the mechanism by which cooperative play turns into resentment.
Scores change only when a patch alters something we tested. One revision exists to date.
| Game | Original | Revised | Reason |
|---|---|---|---|
| Two Acre Cove | 8.1 | 8.5 | Patch added a shared camera option for player two |
These numbers may not be used in advertising, on storefront pages or in promotional material of any kind. A shared-play score removed from its context reads as a general verdict on the game, which it explicitly is not, and that misrepresentation is worse than no quotation at all.
Readers disagree with these numbers frequently, usually because their household is not ours. A pair of equally experienced players will find our skill-gap weighting irrelevant, and should mentally adjust the scores upward for the games we marked down on that basis. That is the correct way to use a site with a stated bias.
