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22/7/26 - Reviews are even more subjective

Reviews, in particular for things like movies, video games and books, are subjective.
I know I know. With a hot take like that I could just finish this article right here. But I'm a white guy on the internet, and I have more opinions to have at you, so buckle up.
Reviews being subjective is fairly universally agreed upon, but often it feels like the idea is not completely believed. So many reviews are still written or presented as if they are trying to reveal an objective truth about the quality about the piece of art, as divined by the reviewer.
My perspective is that there is no such thing as good or bad, and better or worse. Every piece of art, no matter how wonky, is the perfect example of itself. And somewhere in the realm of hypotheticals there is a person for whom even the most inexpertly cobbled together hack job is exactly the kind of thing they are into. The closest thing to 'objective quality' in this approach is just how niche the appeal of a thing is.
OK, this is a bit of a much too broad, Art Theory 101 take. Theoretically I stand by it, but in reality there are definitely the occasional steaming dog turds that I'm perfectly confident in calling terrible, and which realistically nobody without serious head trauma could actually like. Such as Rise of Skywalker.
But sitting above that group, there is a huge nebulous cloud of quality that I genuinely believe is impossible to evaluate in terms of how good or bad it is. The examples that always come to my mind are Ultima VI and HeXen. Now I realise these games aren't exactly panned - they have quite the cult following and decent reputation, but they are not without their criticisms. The inventory system and general mechanics regarding items in Ultima VI is often criticised for being tedious, finnicky busywork. However for me, it's one of the best things about the game - it's such a rich detailed world, sifting manually through items and painstakingly moving them from square to square and inventory slot to inventory slot forces you to engage with the world at a granular level. The way my brain works, this generates immersion. And in a way it's almost therapeutic.
HeXen on the other hand is often criticised for the amount of backtracking you need to do. But for very similar reasons to those mentioned above, I find this just as immersive and relaxing.
I do think there can be a place for ratings, ie how many stars a work earns, but going back to the idea of degrees of niche appeal, I would like to see more reviews that take a kind of 'michelin star' approach. Not getting any michelin stars does not mean your restaurant is bad. Sure, perhaps these days the system has become elitist and pretentious. I don't know. But originally, back when driving was a rare luxury, one star meant 'worth visiting if it's on your way', two was 'worth going out of your way for' and three was 'worth a trip all on its own'. You could reconfigure this idea a bit for how broad its appeal is, and how meaningful the experience is. Zero stars would just mean you probably need to be a very particular type of person to like this thing, and three stars would mean almost anybody would get a very deep and meaningful experience from it.
I tend to prefer those reviews - and they seem to be disappointingly rare - that try as best they can to just dispassionately lay out what the piece of art in question does, keeping in mind people who will and will not like that kind of thing, but refraining from passing value judgement.
One of the few sources of this kind of analysis is, interestingly, the Youtube channel 'playstation access'. It's funded by Sony, and so clearly the team are not allowed to say anything unambiguously bad about a game. To my knowledge they don't really do reviews per se, but they definitely discuss games at length, and you really get a sense of what the games are all about and whether you will like them or not. Additionally, there is a real wholesome positivity to the whole thing, harking back to what it was like when I was a kid and games were just allowed to be cool or fun and we didn't need to find faults and flaws everywhere we looked.