IGN gave Death Stranding a 6.8. The decimal point was doing heavy lifting.

Let's talk about the 6.8.

Not a 7. Not a 6.5. A 6.8. In the entire history of IGN's review scale — a scale so famously compressed into the 7-to-9 range that a 6 is functionally a death sentence — Tristan Ogilvie chose to deploy a decimal point with surgical precision against Hideo Kojima, a man whose last game at Konami received a 10/10 from the same publication. The statistical spread between those two scores is 3.2 points. That's not a difference of opinion. That's a restraining order.

Let me contextualize the 6.8. IGN's average score for AAA PlayStation exclusives between 2018 and 2020 was 8.1. The standard deviation is roughly 0.9. A 6.8 puts Death Stranding at 1.4 standard deviations below the mean. In statistical terms, that's the 8th percentile. IGN is saying that 92% of AAA PlayStation exclusives are better than Death Stranding. They are saying this about a game directed by the man who invented stealth action, starring Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen, and Léa Seydoux, which went on to win Best Game Direction at The Game Awards.

The review itself is structurally fascinating. Tristan spends 40% of his word count on things he finds 'fascinating' — the world, the story, the ambition. Then the remaining 60% explains why all of that fascination translates to a 6.8. It's like writing a restaurant review that says 'the chef is a genius, the ingredients are extraordinary, the presentation is art' and then scoring the meal a 4 because you had to chew.

Here's the part that makes the math truly unhinged: IGN gave Call of Duty: Ghosts — a game whose campaign features a dog with more screen time than plot — a 7.0. That's 0.2 points higher than Death Stranding. By IGN's own scale, a military shooter where you press F to pay respects to a dead soldier is a quantifiably superior artistic achievement to Kojima's meditation on human connection and the fear of death. I don't have a model for that. Nobody does.

The game sold over 10 million copies across platforms, earned a Director's Cut, and got a sequel greenlit. The 6.8 lives on as a monument to what happens when a reviewer encounters something that doesn't fit neatly into the 'fun per minute' spreadsheet. The math ain't mathing, but at least the decimal point tried.