IGN gave The Callisto Protocol a 7. Of course it did. It's always a 7.

Let me get out my ruler. Not a good ruler — the IGN one, which only has a single tick mark on it, and that tick mark says 7. The Callisto Protocol: 7. A gorgeous, gory, deeply flawed survival horror game about getting your skull rearranged in space, and the number that emerges from the machine is a 7, the same digit IGN has been printing since roughly the invention of the abacus. The math ain't mathing, and I say that as a man who has watched IGN score four different games from four different genres with the exact same number in a single week.

Here's what actually happens in the review. Paragraph after paragraph of 'gorgeous,' 'horrifying,' 'let down,' 'repetitive' — a beautiful pile of adjectives that could add up to a 5, a 6, an 8, literally any integer on the number line. Then, at the bottom, like a raffle draw at a sad church fair, the 7 falls out. There is no visible arithmetic connecting the words to the number. It's a verdict arrived at the way a magic 8-ball arrives at 'reply hazy' — by being shaken until something floats up.

And consider the position of 7 on the IGN scale. It is the exact midpoint of the only range IGN uses, which runs from about 6 to 10. Below 6 is where games go to have their funeral; above 9 is reserved for whichever platform holder bought the banner ad that quarter. Everything else is a 7, a number so structurally load-bearing that if you removed it the entire review section would collapse like a folding chair made of press releases. A 7 doesn't mean 'seven out of ten.' It means 'we finished it, it exists, please don't email us.'

So no, I will not accept the 7. I have run the numbers, I have re-run the numbers, I have plotted them on a graph shaped like a shrug. The Callisto Protocol may well be a fine game or a broken one — I have no idea, because the review measured it with a ruler made of soup and handed me back the same number it hands back for everything. The math ain't mathing, it has never mathed, and somewhere in an IGN spreadsheet the '7' cell is worn smooth from use.