Overwhelmingly Positive

Three gates. A Steam review rating of 95 percent or better, at least 500 reviews behind it, and a BANG of 80 or higher. The review floor is the part people argue with. Five hundred is low if you treat thousands of reviews as the mark of a real game. I put it there deliberately: 1,347 games in the catalog sit at 95 percent or better, and 81 of those have fewer than 500 reviews. Those are the ones where nine friends and a Discord server can carry a rating. Past 500 the percentage stops being a fluke and starts being a fact. The BANG floor at 80 keeps this from becoming a list of beloved games that cost too much.

Portal 2 is the anchor: 98.7 percent positive across 464,699 reviews, 8.5 hours, BANG 91.1. Kabuto Park is the other shape of it, a bug-catching game with 4,459 reviews at 99.2 percent and a BANG of 94.5. Papa's Freezeria Deluxe scores 97 with 21 hours on the clock, which surprises me every time I see it.

Here is where the cut misleads. Sorting by review percentage first means Kabuto Park's 99.2 from four thousand people outranks Portal 2's 98.7 from nearly half a million, and statistically that is backwards. It also stacks the top with tiny free games. 154 of the 604 cost nothing, because short and free is the cheapest way to make nobody angry.