The Difficulty Depth Chart™
One scale, two jobs
The same D1 to D5 number does two things, and keeping them clear is the whole point:
- As a grade, it's one verdict per game: how deep the water is. That's the stampable badge.
- As a training path, it's the staged route down, Surface to Abyss, and it descends only as deep as the game's grade.
A game's grade is how deep its training goes. A D2 game's training fills the Surface and Shallow stages, then stops, because the game doesn't go deeper. A D5 game's training descends all five stages to the Abyss. The verdict and the map are the same number.
Why water?
It's the one metaphor, and we add no others. Depth is something everyone already feels: the surface is safe and bright, the abyss is dark and cold. That intuition does the explaining for us, in the grade, the visuals, and the section names.
The five grades
Whole grades only. No decimals, no half-steps. A game is one of these five.
Jump right in
Playable within seconds. The game teaches itself as you go; no prep, no guide, no friction.
Learn a few basics
A small handful of ideas to grasp, then the game opens up. A five-minute orientation is enough.
Some preparation recommended
Worth reading up or watching one good video before you dive. A little prep saves an hour of confusion.
Significant learning curve
Real study and deliberate practice before it clicks. Plenty of players bounce off here without a plan.
Brutal from the start
No easy way in. Punishing early, steep throughout. The honest call is sometimes "don't jump in." We render this one as a warning for a reason.
The 6-point rubric
Never a vibe number. A precise internal score is computed from six fixed measures, identical for every game, so any two games are directly comparable.
From six numbers to one grade
The six sub-scores produce a precise internal number. That number maps to exactly one of D1 to D5. The precision lives in the engine; the published badge is always a clean whole grade. We store every sub-score and a written justification, so the breakdown ("why it's a D4") is always shown and a critic can verify it. The rubric is locked, so grades don't drift as we add games or critics.
The criteria are deliberately abstract so they span wildly different games. We rate "time to competent," not "how hard is building a base" or "how hard is a boss." That's what lets a falling-sand sandbox and a voxel RPG sit on the same honest scale.
Two grades, same axis
Like Rotten Tomatoes, but the only question is "how hard to learn."
The Depth Chart grade
Our in-house analysis: the six-point rubric computed into one grade, approved by our team. The authority is the transparent method, not a personality, so it works with zero outside input. A named expert can co-sign a grade and earn a byline, but one is never required.
Player grade
The community votes on the same axis. Each vote is email-verified (a confirm link), so a fake email can't pad the count. The grade stays hidden until 10 confirmed votes — below that we show the count, never a fake low-volume grade. Hitting 10 also flags the game for our full evaluation, so players decide what we grade next.
The gap is the story
Like Rotten Tomatoes, a game can have our grade with no player votes yet, or player votes before we've graded it. When both exist, every hub features the gap. If we call a game a D2 but players say D4, that disagreement is the most useful thing on the page, and the most shareable.
The Depth Chart badge
The grade is delivered as a stampable mark, built to live on third-party pages: game sites, store listings, streamer overlays. D5 always wears a warning treatment. Every badge carries Review and AggregateRating schema so engines extract the grade unambiguously.
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