Kotaku reported everyone else's Shattered Space reviews while sitting on its own. 'It's complicated.'

Let's do inventory on the numbers in this article. There's a Metacritic aggregate. There's a Steam percentage. There's a $30 price tag and a roughly 10-hour campaign. There's a tally of how hard everyone else dunked on the DLC. Do you know how many numbers in this piece belong to Kotaku? Zero. None. Not one integer with a Kotaku passport. This is a review-shaped object assembled entirely from other people's arithmetic, like a man building a house out of borrowed ladders and then charging admission to look at it.

And then the byline says the quiet part into a megaphone: 'I've been playing Shattered Space all week and have a lot of thoughts but will hold them until my review is published. TL;DR: it's complicated.' Sir. You have the data. You ran the experiment for a week. You are standing in the lab holding the results, and you have chosen to publish a summary of what the other labs got. 'It's complicated' is not a finding. It's a shrug that put on a lab coat to sneak into the building.

Here's the part that makes my spreadsheet weep. The entire thesis is that the score is low — that the aggregate cratered, that the players are angry, that the number is bad. So the article is ABOUT scores. It is load-bearing scores, top to bottom. It just refuses to contribute one. That's not principled score abstinence, that's showing up to a potluck with an empty dish and a detailed review of everyone else's casserole. You can't be the guy who says numbers are reductive while running a headline that's a number wearing a hat.

So we have a writer with a week of firsthand data, publishing a piece whose only quantitative content was harvested from strangers on Steam, promising the actual verdict later, like a weather forecast that reads 'other meteorologists seem upset, full outlook pending.' The math aint mathing. You had the sample size. You had the playtime. You had the one opinion nobody else on the internet could file, and you filed everyone else's instead.