

Yes, Rebirth required a hardware upgrade to play, which is going to lose a lot of players compared to the install base of the PS4 in 2020. There are also the folks waiting for the trilogy to finish before picking up either the entire set or the one in the middle they hadn’t played yet. And anecdotally, though I haven’t seen this stat tracked yet, if you make me wait over a year for exclusivity to run out before you port it to my platform, I’m not playing it the first day it’s available; they trained me to wait already, so I may as well wait for a deep sale. I still haven’t purchased or played Rebirth, but I plan to during this upcoming summer sale, and I’m replaying Remake now ahead of that.
Review scores are just someone’s opinion, and they’re only “inflated” when it’s not an opinion you share.


















One of this year’s best-rated games is a 2D game that looks like it was made for the Game Boy Color, and last year’s Call of Duty got a 65 on OpenCritic. Perhaps critics like Remake and Rebirth for the ways they subverted the idea of remaking a classic while still integrating a classic combat system into a modern one, as that’s what their words would seem to indicate. The reality is that what you might consider a masterpiece is going to be grating for someone else, and that’s going to bring down its average review score.