The Difficulty Depth Chart

Know how hard a game is to learn.

Most people bounce off a great game in the first hour: not because it's bad, but because no one said how hard it'd be to learn. We grade that, D1 to D5, and train you to descend only as deep as the game goes.

One scale, from Surface to Abyss

Water depth is the whole idea: deeper means darker, colder, harder to learn. Every game lands on exactly one grade.

D1Surface

Jump right in

You're playing within seconds. The game teaches itself.

D2Shallow

Learn a few basics

A handful of ideas to grasp, then it opens up. Pictorbit lives here.

D3Midwater

Some preparation recommended

Worth reading up before you dive. A little prep pays off fast.

D4Deep

Significant learning curve

Expect real study and practice before it clicks.

D5Abyss

Brutal from the start

No easy way in. Go in knowing it, or don't jump.

Read the full chart and rubric

The grade that travels

A clean grade, built to be stamped anywhere

The Depth Chart badge is a single, at-a-glance verdict, like ESRB or a PG rating, designed to live on someone else's page: a game site, a store listing, a streamer overlay. It carries Review and rating schema so search engines and AI read the grade unambiguously.

Precision lives in the engine. The published badge is always a clean whole grade, D1 to D5. No decimals, no half-steps.

Difficulty Depth Chart D2Shallow Pictorbit · learn a few basics jumpintogaming.comOur grade

How a game gets graded

The system picks underserved games automatically. People approve every grade. Publishing is never automated.

01

Select

Each week the engine scores candidates on demand minus coverage: games with a passionate community and no good guide yet. Not the popular games (those already have IGN and Fandom), the underserved ones.

02

Grade

Six fixed measures, scored 1 to 10, identical for every game, produce a precise internal number that maps to one whole grade. The breakdown is always shown, so you can see exactly why it's a D2 and not a D3.

03

Review

A draft hub and a draft grade go to our team. We check the grade, the breakdown, and that the training stands on its own as original writing. If it reads like a transcript summary, it fails and is rebuilt.

04

Publish

Only on a person's sign-off does it go live: a real human stands behind every grade. A wrong grade is a broken promise, not a rounding error, so accuracy is the whole brand.

The lifeguard, not the cheerleader

Sometimes the right answer is "don't jump in"

This isn't a "is the game good" score. It's only "how hard is it to learn." Honest grades help you play games you'll love and skip the wrong dive. When a game is a D5 Abyss, we say so, plainly, so you can decide with your eyes open.