The modern games industry is increasingly organized around making enormous, expensive products that try to satisfy everyone.

The result is often technically impressive but creatively safe: games built to avoid criticism, justify their budgets, and provide the maximum possible quantity of content. At The Falcon Show, one of our biggest interests is in the games that take the opposite approach: strange, focused, imperfect games that commit to an idea even when that idea limits their audience.

Traditional game review scores are not very good at recognizing those games.

A 7/10 frequently becomes a polite way of consigning something to the dustbin of history, especially when reviewers penalize a game for not being bigger, broader, or more polished than it ever intended to be. But a recommendation should tell you whether a particular game offers an experience worth having, not merely how completely it conforms to the expectations surrounding a major release.

We coined the term “Perfect 7” for exactly this reason.

It gives us a way to reconsider games whose flaws are obvious but ultimately beside the point: games we replay more often, remember more clearly, and feel more strongly about than many supposed masterpieces. Finding them is not just an exercise in nostalgia or contrarianism.

It is our attempt to identify what games actually need in order to be worthwhile and to argue that ambition combined with an understanding of scope may be a better model for gaming than endless size, expense, and safety.

“Perfect 7” episodes revolve around sorting through the history of 7/10 games and building a practical guide for people looking to discover them. We think these games deserve far more attention than they received the first time around.