Rated B for Bananas: The Great Indie Review Scale Rebellion

Somewhere out there, a gaming website just gave a game a 7.5. Nobody noticed. Nobody argued. Nobody cared. That, more than anything, might be the number's epitaph.

For decades, the 10-point review score has been the industry's default currency — a single digit meant to compress forty hours of play into something a marketing deck could tape to a billboard. But if you've been paying attention to the scrappier corners of games media, you've noticed something weird happening. Games are getting rated in bananas. In bees. In burgers. And weirdly? Audiences are eating it up.

The Death of the Decimal

The 10-point scale died the moment it stopped being descriptive and started being defensive. A 7 stopped meaning "pretty good" and started meaning "the developer's publicist will call if we go lower." A 6 became a career risk. Everything clustered between 7 and 9 like cars on a highway at rush hour — technically moving, going nowhere.

Readers noticed. So did the editors running small outlets on shoe-string budgets and duct-taped WordPress installs. When your entire operation is three people in a Discord server, you don't owe anyone a number.

"We realized the score was the least-read part of every review," one editor of a midwestern indie site told me. "Except when it wasn't. Then it was the only thing anyone read. So we asked: what if the number was something nobody could take seriously enough to weaponize?"

Their solution: they now score everything in raccoons. Five raccoons is a masterpiece. Zero raccoons means the game bit them.

A Field Guide to Absurd Metrics

The zoo of replacement scales is genuinely delightful:

• Bananas. A popular retro site rates games on a scale of one to five bananas, because "a banana is an honest fruit. It doesn't lie about its ripeness."
• Bees. One bug-focused indie blog scores games by pollination value. A polished but soulless game earns one bee. A janky gem with heart earns a full hive.
• Burgers. A food-obsessed outlet reviews games like diner fare — "greasy but satisfying," "five-dollar milkshake pretentious" — and converts it all to burger counts at the end.

The brilliance is structural, not just comedic. When your scale is absurd, it cannot be aggregated. There is no Metacritic for raccoons. No publisher can pull ad money over a two-burger score, because what does that even mean in a boardroom? The absurdity is armor.

Why Readers Trust the Weird Ones

Here's the counterintuitive part: audiences report more trust in outlets with silly scales, not less. A number out of ten carries the false authority of science — it looks like a measurement even when it's a vibe. "Four out of five bees" announces itself as an opinion from a person, made with a wink.

It also forces the actual review to do the work. You can't skim to the score and move on, because the score is nonsense without context. You have to read the paragraph. Imagine that.

There's a heritage angle here, too — and yes, we're obliged to mention it. Retro gaming culture has always run on weird grading. Anyone who's bought a cartridge off eBay knows the terror of "loose, label wear, plays great" — a scale invented by collectors, understood by collectors, and completely meaningless to outsiders. Absurd scales are just collector grading with better jokes.

Ditching Metacritic Brain: A Starter Kit

Thinking of rebelling at your own tiny outlet? A practical path:

1. Pick something from your site's actual identity. If you're a cooking-games blog, burgers. If you're a bug-lover, bees. The scale should feel inevitable, not bolted on.
2. Define the top of the scale. What does a five-banana game do? Write it down. The bottom can stay fuzzy — mystery is fun.
3. Kill the decimals forever. Absurd scales work because they're coarse. Half a raccoon is a legal nightmare.
4. Keep the review the star. The scale is a garnish, not the meal. If your metric is funnier than your writing, you've made a mascot, not a review.
5. Commit. Nothing is less trustworthy than a site that scores in bees one week and out of ten the next. Chaos needs rules.

Long Live the Scale

The 10-point scale isn't coming back because it never really worked — it just had tenure. The outlets replacing it with fruit and insects aren't dumbing anything down. They're doing something the big aggregators can't: admitting that criticism is humans reacting to art, in public, with their whole chest.

A number out of ten pretends to be a verdict. Five raccoons admits to being a conversation. And in 2025, with trust in games media somewhere below a Konami silent protagonist, a conversation is worth more than a verdict.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go decide whether this trend earns four bananas or a full hive. The comment section may vote.