IGN gave Sonic Frontiers a 7 — the house number for games it's too polite to have a feeling about.

Ah, the seven. IGN's eternal seven, the house wine of American games criticism — poured warm, in a plastic cup, at every table regardless of what is being served. Monsieur Northup gazes upon Sonic Frontiers, an entire strange blue cosmos, and produces the precise number he would produce for a sandwich, a tax form, or a mild draught in a hallway. Seven. It is not a judgment. It is a reflex. The man has been so thoroughly trained to feel nothing that his verdict arrives pre-shrugged, a Gallic exhale committed to a spreadsheet.

Consider the sentence he hands us as a verdict: the game 'mostly succeeds at mixing up the Sonic formula, even when some of its ideas fall flat.' Mostly. Even when. Read it aloud and you can hear a critic performing an entire ballet expressly to avoid ever setting a single foot upon the ground. It is the prose of a man who ordered the nine-course tasting menu and described every plate as 'food, more or less.' To hold an opinion is to risk being wrong, and Monsieur Northup would sooner microwave a first edition of Proust in a gas station than risk a full point in either direction.

This is the quiet genius of the seven: it is the number you award when you wish the publisher to keep answering your emails and the audience to keep clicking your byline. Below a seven, someone is furious with you. Above an eight, someone expects you to defend it at dinner. So the IGN critic has built a small beige monastery precisely upon the 7.0 meridian, where no game is ever quite wretched enough to condemn nor quite radiant enough to celebrate — a fence so comfortable he has installed a hammock upon it. He does not review games. He appraises them, for insurance purposes.

And so Sonic Frontiers, whatever in truth it is, vanishes into the great grey filing cabinet of the Acceptable, embalmed at seven-tenths of an enthusiasm no living person has ever felt. The score tells you nothing because it was engineered to tell you nothing — a verdict built to survive contact with every conceivable reader, offending no one, illuminating nothing. C'est joli, this cowardice, in its little way. But let us not mistake it for taste. This is not culture. This is commerce with a decimal point.